So full of intriguing minor characters is [Friends and Heroes], so evocative of both place and mood, and so well proportioned the incidents that provide constant narrative pleasure, however, that one might extract from the trilogy all kinds of meanings and thereby lose the overlying quality, which is simply to have covered an amazingly full and colourful canvas with people and scenes so real and so authoritatively recalled that it hardly seems like fiction. This is intended as a compliment. Rare among women writers in letting the facts speak and in caring enormously for authenticity, Miss Manning persuades us that we were there….

Inescapably, the retelling of events now read as history imposes its own dramatic irony on such a novel—the reader knows, even if the Pringles do not, how much worse their predicament will become during 1941 and how transitory, in the end, will seem all their...