The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club by Helen Simonson

“In the first place, it did not seem quite right that a girl that young should be free to wander the hotel and seaside town without a chaperone.”

The Great War is over, and the summer of 1919 should be one of celebration, but Constance Haverhill has lost her mother to the Spanish influenza. Constance also lost the job managing Lord Mercer’s country estate, which she held all through the war, to a man. Her only options seem to be marrying (to whom, with all the young men killed?) or a position as — God forbid! — a governess. Acting as temporary companion to an old family friend takes Constance to the seaside town of Hazelbourne, where life is about to get very interesting and very complicated. Here she meets Poppy Wirrall, daughter of the local baronet and owner of a motorcycle taxi and delivery service, the members of Poppy’s ladies motorcycle club, and Poppy’s wounded and brooding fighter pilot brother. The war years have left them all irrevocably changed, so just how can they survive society’s expectations that they will slip back into their former roles? And what is to be done with the wreck of a Sopwith Camel that Poppy brings home?

This book is both a delightful froth of a story, as warm and breezy as a day at the beach in July, and a biting commentary on social, economic, racial and gender inequalities in post-war England. It is a sweet romance, a fun caper spiced with danger in which young women kick off the traces of a restrictive past, and yet … that past returns, as the men return from the front, to try and push them back where they “belong”. But as Simonson so ably draws, the picture is not so black and white; these women who have tasted more are not going to back down.

This book is both a delightful froth of a story, as warm and breezy as a day at the beach in July, and a biting commentary on social, economic, racial and gender inequalities in post-war England.

Simonson’s writing is delightful, delicious, evocative of an age in transition — after the war but before the Roaring 20s take off — that at first seems coloured by the soft pastel of nostalgia. It is afternoon tea and flowing dresses, broad-brimmed, ribbon-trimmed hats and strolls over manicured lawns, tennis whites and the soft click of croquet balls in the distance. It is fun, innocent capers and joy-filled days in the sun. But she makes no attempt to cover the raised eyebrows, raised noses, overt racism, the cruelty of the upper classes to those “beneath” them, and the trauma a brutal war left on the men and women who faced it. She deftly navigates the path between entertaining and informing, creating a delightful, satisfying story spiced with a sobering reality of life for those not rich, male and white.

If you’re a Downton Abbey fan, or just looking for a little escape with class and substance, this is your beach read of 2024. And as with all good books, it will make you want to pick up Simonson’s previous works!

Helen Simonson was born in England and spent her teenage years in a small village in East Sussex. A graduate of the London School of Economics, she has spent the last three decades in the United States and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. Simonson is married, with two grown sons, and is the author of the New York Times bestselling debut novel Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. This is her second novel.

Publisher: Doubleday Canada (May 7, 2024)
Hardcover 10″ x 6″ | 432 pages
ISBN: 9780385693776

Heather McBriarty

Heather McBriarty is an author, lecturer and Medical Radiation Technologist based in Saint John, NB. Her love of reading and books began early in life, as did her love of writing, but it was the discovery of old family correspondence that led to her first non-fiction book, Somewhere in Flanders: Letters from the Front,and a passion for the First World War. She has delivered lectures to the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society, NB Genealogy Society, and Western Front Association (Central Ontario Branch), among others, on the war. Heather’s first novel of the “Great War”, Amid the Splintered Trees, was launched in November 2021.