The Night Raid

by Clare Harvey

First published 2017

Amazon

3.9(356)

During the Second World War, the artist Laura Knight is commissioned to portray women doing essential industrial work and returns to Nottingham to study life inside an ordnance factory. There she encounters Violet and Zelah, two fictional young women whose wartime employment has brought them into a dangerous environment of machinery, explosives, long shifts and official expectations about how female workers should be represented to the public.

Knight's presence gives the novel a documented historical anchor: her wartime art included celebrated images of women in industry, while the fictional factory workers allow Harvey to explore the lives behind such propaganda images. Zelah's experience of the Plymouth Blitz and the secrets carried by the women connect factory work to the wider destruction of the British Home Front, producing a story about art, memory, friendship and the gap between an official portrait of wartime resilience and private experience.