Patrick Hamilton’s intense and detailed skill at observation makes this book a page-turner about a microcosm of wartime England. Forced by nightly bombings to decamp from London to the suburb of Thames Lockdon, thirty-nine-year-old publisher’s assistant Miss Roach has settled in Mrs. Payne’s Rosamund Tea Room, no longer a tea room, but now a boardinghouse. Her life ticks along, no more or less unhappily than any other Briton displaced by war; she is bothered by the house bully, Mr. Thwaites, and his pretentious tendency to hold forth during meals, but it’s all tolerable. But Miss Roach’s claustrophobic and straitened life is soon transformed by the arrival of two new characters in her life—“her” American lieutenant, with whom she drinks more than she likes, and Vicki Kugelman, a German good-time girl who settled in the boardinghouse. Together these three create an explosive combination that drives Miss Roach to distraction. Hamilton is genius at describing the inner workings of these relationships, how Miss Roach thinks about them, and how they color her thinking about the war. These obnoxious personalities drive the plot—and Miss Roach—to a crisis, but she is left standing, with a kind of resiliency she will need to get through the rest of the war. Such a different book than ‘Hangover Square,’ but Hamilton’s use of language is still a delight.