Kate Thompson (Stepney Doorstep Society) Books in Order

Sixteen-year-old Poppy arrives at a Bethnal Green clothing factory carrying a painful secret. As she forms friendships with other seamstresses, wartime London exposes their hidden troubles and tests the bonds they build through work and shared hardship.

Orphan Flossy finds a surrogate family among women sewing for the war effort at a Bethnal Green factory. As bombing drives them into underground shelters, newcomers and longtime workers struggle with secrets, shifting loyalties, and uncertain futures.

In 1936 Bethnal Green, three friends work around a photography studio and dressmaking shop that promise newlyweds a touch of glamour. Their own hopes for romance and escape face growing uncertainty as another war approaches.

Four women making matches for the army transform part of their factory grounds into an allotment. Amid bombing and exhausting work, the garden offers friendship and refuge, but the secrets its creators carry threaten that fragile comfort.

Drawing on the experiences of five East End women, Thompson recounts how working-class matriarchs protected their families and communities through war and peace. Their stories reveal the practical courage behind survival in bombsites, tenements, and crowded underground shelters.

At a cosmetics factory in wartime Stratford, outspoken Renee befriends an Austrian refugee and helps her adjust to East End life. Beyond the lipstick production line, family secrets and mounting danger threaten the friendships sustaining the workers.

Women at the Yardley cosmetics factory face pressures that extend beyond wartime work. Marriage, forbidden love, and hidden ambitions test their loyalties as they depend on one another to survive both the conflict and upheavals at home.

In wartime Bethnal Green, librarian Clara and her friend Ruby build a library in a disused underground station. Among the sheltering community, books provide escape, but sustaining that refuge becomes increasingly difficult as danger presses on their loved ones.

Ordered to destroy books by Jersey’s Nazi occupiers, librarian Grace hides them instead and creates a secret book club with her friend. Their quiet effort to sustain islanders through reading becomes increasingly dangerous as occupation turns more violent.

Renee Salt recalls surviving ghettos and Nazi concentration camps alongside her mother, Sala. Written with Kate Thompson, the memoir traces the small acts of protection and enduring maternal love that helped Renee survive Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

War separates librarians Joyce and Dorotha, leaving one organizing book deliveries and shelter in London while the other shares forbidden reading in occupied Poland. Their efforts to preserve hope through books continue as reunion becomes harder to imagine.