The Girls of Slender Means, by Muriel Spark

“Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor” so begins Muriel Spark’s biting and satiric tale of war-ravaged London… a group of remarkably resourceful young women struggling to get by as best they know how. Here are eccentric lives that are, at once, funny, touching and tragic – heroines of pluck and substance in a world gone mad – brilliantly rendered with extraordinary skill by a consummate literary artist.