A brilliantly conceived and unputdownable piece of "memoir" writing.

Is this a diary or a novel? An "ordinary" woman lives through extraordinary times. But Millicent King is actually not ordinary at all, and what's more she lives through extraordinary events in the 20th century.

Presented as the "edited" journal of a real-life woman who was born in 1901 and died in 1995, this is fiction where every word rings true. Millie starts her diary at the age of 13, on the eve of the Great War. With vividness and a touching clearsightedness she records her brother's injury, her father's death from pneumonia, and the family's bankruptcy, giving up college to take a soul-destroying job as a shop assistant. From bohemian literary London to Rome in the twenties, she has lovers, ambition and conviction. But her life is turned upside down, first by the death of her sister, leaving two small children to care for, and then by the prison-camp death of the only man she ever truly loves.

Here is quintessential twentieth-century woman coping with the small and large upheavals of life, and making it through. A triumph -- not to mention a brilliantly clever piece of "memoir" writing, which might have everyone fooled.

Margaret Forster is the author of bestselling memoirs, Hidden Lives and Precious Lives, biographies of Daphne du Maurier and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and of many successful novels including, most recently, The Memory Box.