Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau

This is a charmer. I’m sitting here wondering whether that does proper justice to the book, but I really can’t think of a better word. And with charm something in short supply these days, that makes it all the more of a lovely achievement.

Mrs Hart set up her bureau after the First World War, to help maimed and injured soldiers find a wife. Now, in the mid-1930s, she hires young April McVey to breathe new life in to the business. Does she ever!

Soon we’re introduced to Felicity, a writer of children’s stories and romantic tosh for magazines; her widowed brother Fabian and his sulky daughter Prudence. Not to mention the bureau’s clients: all individuals, all lovingly drawn. And plain-speaking April, from Ulster, with a knack for cutting through propriety without - almost – ever offending anyone.

And it brings these characters to life without a single knowing post-modern wink to say, ‘Boy, aren’t we better than this lot of old-fashioned fogies?’ It takes them – and their world – seriously. A world where people take tea, use surnames when addressing anyone but close friends, and an ‘understanding’ is not a code word for the swingers’ lifestyle. It brings a bygone age to life without the knowing, willful eccentricity of Lessons in Chemistry (a book I happen to love, by the way).

It's a story that moves along at a brisk pace, with every event made perfectly believable, and all the plot lines brought together at the end in a satisfyingly warm glow of a knot. These characters have earned their happiness, and when they find it, you don’t begrudge them that for a second.

An absolute charmer.