April Grove, a Street at War Books in Order

The April Grove books are Lilian Harry at her most full-blooded wartime. Set in a working-class street in Portsmouth, the series follows the families of April Grove from the outbreak of war through bombing, separation, hard work, and the long push toward peace. It opens with Goodbye Sweetheart, where one ordinary street suddenly has to absorb everything the war can throw at it.

This is very much an ensemble saga. There are children being evacuated, sweethearts rushing into marriage, mothers trying to hold households together, girls taking on new work, and men leaving for service or returning changed by what they have seen. No single plotline tells the whole story. Instead, Harry lets the street do that job.

April Grove is small, but the world keeps crashing into it.

One of the strengths of the series is the way it shows wartime life from the home front outwards. The books are full of shelters, shortages, rumours, uniforms, factory shifts, letters, queues, and kitchens. Later volumes widen the focus even more, bringing in women working in the services, at armament depots, and in civil defence. The pressure of war never feels abstract. It is always shaping work, love, money, and family life.

The tone is emotional but grounded. These books care about romance, but they care just as much about fear, pride, exhaustion, and the stubborn business of keeping a family going when everything familiar is under threat. Harry is especially good at showing how war changes women, opening doors for some while closing them for others.

Across titles like Keep Smiling Through, Moonlight & Lovesongs, Under the Apple Tree, and A Farthing Will Do, the series tracks both the damage and the endurance of a close-knit community. Bombs fall, marriages strain, children grow up too fast, and peace does not magically solve everything. In many ways, the later books are just as interested in what comes after the crisis as in the crisis itself.

If you enjoy wartime family sagas with lots of intersecting lives, this is one of Harry's strongest series. It gives you romance, yes, but also the street-level texture of war, the feeling that history is happening not just in headlines but in sculleries, shelters, canteens, and doorsteps.