Blackout Nights on Sparrow Street: 3

She'd been waiting a year and a half to do her bit. On the night she turned eighteen, in the middle of an air raid, she decided she was done waiting.Ivy Doyle turns eighteen in the spring of 1941, in the shaking dark of the shelter with the bombs coming down, and the moment the all-clear sounds she walks into Nell's shop and announces she is going to be an ambulance driver - going toward the bombs in the blackout, pulling the wounded from the rubble, driving the dying to hospital through the raging East End nights. Nell says two words: good girl.What follows is not the adventure Ivy dreamed of. Her first night out in the raid teaches her, swiftly and forever, what the war truly is - and she carries what she sees in the rubble that night silent to the end of her life, the way soldiers carry what they see. But she goes back. Every night, through the worst of the Blitz, she drives into the fire and pulls out the living, and comforts the dying, and goes back for more. And in the firestorm, covered in brick dust and grief, she finds Jack Fletcher - the rescue man who goes into the collapsing buildings when everyone else runs from them - and falls in love in the only way you can fall in love during the Blitz: fiercely, fully, knowing any night might be the last.Three weeks before their wedding, Jack goes into a building after a buried child. The building comes down.Blackout Nights on Sparrow Street is the third book in The Sparrow Street Girls World War Two saga - the most emotionally powerful book in the series, a wartime love story about an ambulance girl and a rescue man, a wedding wrenched from the jaws of grief, and the end of the Blitz - nine months of fire that forged a street of ordinary women into something unbreakable.A historical saga for fans of Dilly Court, Ellie Dean, and Nadine Dorries - and for anyone who has ever loved someone enough to choose them in the full knowledge of the cost.She drove toward the bombs every night so that someone would come home to someone. She never once thought about herself. That was who Ivy Doyle was. And the whole of Sparrow Street loved her for it.