Snow over Skelbeck

Yorkshire, 1946. The war is over. The hard part is just beginning.

Josie Thwaite has driven lorries through the blackout and staff cars across half of Germany. Coming home to Skelbeck, the little West Riding wool town where her family has printed the weekly paper since 1879, was only ever meant to be for now.

But her fathers eyes are failing, her brother has come back from the Far East with nothing to say, and the Skelbeck Gazette is down to a handful of pages on rationed newsprint with no one left to write them. So Josie picks up a notebook and finds the towns stories on every doorstep: the families squatting in the old searchlight camp, the war brides leaving, a German prisoner at the Christmas table.

She also finds Vince Garnett, the papers compositor, back from printing the Armys maps, a Labour man from the back-to-backs who reads her copy backwards and finds every mistake. Her mother thinks she can do better. His mother thinks she will be off to Leeds. And a Leeds evening paper has made an offer for the Gazette, and is about to make one for Josie.

Then, in January 1947, the snow comes, and it does not stop. The mill falls silent, the lights go out twice a day, and when the blizzard brings the lines down, the only voice the cut-off town has left is a paper printed by hand by lamplight.

Snow over Skelbeck is the first book in The Editors Daughters, a heartwarming post-war family saga of four sisters, one brother, a small-town newspaper and the hard years that remade them all. Perfect for readers who love sisters, a town that talks, real history worn lightly, and a happy ending earned the hard way.

A clean, closed-door post-war saga: no explicit content and no gore.