Soul searchers

Dark histories and singular heroines make for a lively read with these page-turners.

- GILL SOUTH

THE MIDNIGHT NEWS, by Jo Baker (Hachette, $37.99)

It's London in 1940 and the Blitz has just begun. Charlotte Richmond, the 20-year-old daughter of a baronet, is doing her bit for the war effort in the Ministry of Information. Charlotte's life is thrown into uproar when she starts losing friends to the bombs. She's already lost her beloved brother, Eddie, in the early months of the war. But she doesn't totally lose her dead friends' company. They start talking to her, at times amusingly jostling for her attention. Charlotte notices that one man keeps popping up wherever she is and she begins to wonder if her friends are dying not because of the Blitz but because of her. So she starts investigating how they've died. One particularly suspicious mystery is the death of her beloved best friend, Elena, who looks untouched by any kind of explosion despite her mother's insistence that she was killed by a bomb.

Charlotte shares her concerns with a young man, Tom, who she meets feeding the birds outside her office. Tom, whose disabilities make him unable to fight, is a clever psychology student whose father is an undertaker who might be able to help with Charlotte's investigations. But before long, she asks one too many questions and is whisked off by her family to an asylum, where we learn she was earlier committed, aged 17. She knows she will have to use all her ingenuity to escape.

Throughout this heart-wrenching novel, class differences are always prominent. It's something that clearly intrigues Baker, whose novel Longbourn looked at the Bennet household in Pride & Prejudice from the servants' point of view. Class structures blurred in Britain during the war, when aristocratic young women from the Home Counties worked alongside East Enders.