'There was nothing to do but wait - and dance,' DeCourcy / 'We met on VJ night, supposedly celebrating victory. The bomb cast shadows that we have lived in ever since,' Bingham.

This summer I had found two books on a similar theme, the effect of prewar and post.
The first book is the poetic description of a world, a society ending,  culminating the post war world of WWI to the anxiety ridden, stillness of 1939, 'The Last Season', is sublime.
Anne DeCourcy's use of facts such as the dropping birthrate of the 1930's to the average age of marriage 27.7 for men and 25.58 for woman to her look at the violent crimes of the 1930's which were uncommon outside the home to the ability to wander freely and only certain area of London which where considered unsafe brings the era alive.
She then goes on to describe Germany from the view point of a visitor who would come back thinking that the corruption of civic life was grossly exaggerated, although the Berliner's look on and vainly had  worked to end it.  The book then goes on to describe the important figures of the day, Chamberlin to Churchill, and the society they lived in along with the debutantes of the era, diplomacy and dancing.  To the last paragraph which is the King's diary, 'Today we are at war again, and I am no longer a midshipman in the Royal Navy.'
The effect of this novel is like a still painting, a moment in time captured.

'Wind off the Sea,' by the author Charlotte Bingham is a romance novel.  Bingham's excellent writing and creation of war stories that she creates around her character's is the underlying beat of this book.
We know the character's have either been through the war or grown up in it.   She brings into her English southern coastal village an American stranger who is searching for his Mother's past or some of the history of his family.  Waldo Astley, her character comes into the life's of each family to bring about a better life or enlighten them on what life can be.  So enchanted is he with the village, he buys a home and falls in love with a war heroine.  This is set in the backdrop of a country struggling to overcome the war years  the economy and the freezing winters that were England's lot after the war.

Bingham is a skilled writer with a lot of work to her credit.  It takes a very good writer to make this type of story seem credible and she does it well.  

One of these books is more fact than fiction creating an era and the other is fiction in a setting of fact.  They are both a very enriching and entertaining.