The Green Days

By Desiree Meyler

When Dinah and Harriet Vivian run away from their father’s second marriage, they turn to their Great-Aunt Lilian and her huge Victorian villa, Runnymede. But Lilian doesn’t want them. They disturb her peaceful selfish life and besides, how could they have let their father marry his scandalous mistress? How like the insane adult world to believe that two young girls could prevent their father marrying at all!

The sisters soon find themselves thrown into a totally different life to the one they had been used to in London. This is Cambridge in 1939 and when the war breaks out the change is rapid – not least in Dinah herself – who at last begins to see that things are not quite as they seem…

Against an evocative background of England before and during the Second World War, Désirée Meyler’s charming novel is centred on Dinah’s growing maturity, sensitively and sympathetically conveyed. A moving coming-of-age story that will entertain and delight until the very last word.

Désirée Meyler was born into a Pembrokeshire family in west Wales. Studying at the School of Art, Cambridge with Ronald Searle in the late 1930s, she decided to change direction and became a prolific short story writer following the outbreak of World War I. Her first novel, The Quiet Rebel was published in 1970.