Yours From the Tower

This book is technically brilliant and consistently engaging. It tells its story via letters exchanged by three teenage girls after they have left the boarding school where they had become close friends. It’s 1896, and none of them has it easy. Tirzah is now virtually imprisoned in Scotland by a tyrannical grandmother, her own parents having disappeared long ago. Sophia is pushed into the London Season with instructions to marry as fast and well as she can in order to rescue her family’s straitened finances. Polly works in a Liverpool orphanage, a job she loves, and is the only one content with her lot.

All remain as feisty as they can, but there is no disguising the hardships they suffer. Modern readers may well feel aghast that young women not so very long ago were first deprived of education and then of any reasonable hope of a career. But by sticking to each other they all come out triumphant, although this is a near-run conclusion. But no-one could possibly begrudge them their eventual happiness, still through marriage but in every case having now found the right person. Incidental detail skilfully woven into the narrative meanwhile offers a vivid picture of slum life at one end and the various pettifogging conventions once demanded in higher society at the other.

Sally Nicholls is a prize-winning author, with her previous Things a Bright Girl Can Do a deserved best-seller. But this current novel could well be her best yet. Young readers may find their parents also wanting to read this heart-warming story, which so artfully shows how grim reality can with luck still finally give way to the irrepressible optimism and determination of these three girls in their efforts to live a more fulfilling life.