This tiny feather-light novel is like a love-song to a very specific time, April to July 1945, and place, London, a girls' hostel, located just behind Kensington Gardens, such that you can see the Albert Memorial if you shove your head out of one of the third floor windows and crane your neck. So there's all these girls, thrown around by the war, that's why they're in a hostel, working for some ministry or another probably, all poor, mostly middle-class, one of whom is - well, fast, and also there's this guy, a jackass would be anarchist-poet who hangs around, but not such a jackass, as he gets to shag Selina, and have Sunday lunches with the girls. It's all rather fetching in a BBC historical drama sort of way (do you think we could get Helena Bonham-Carter?), except that there's not much of a tune. But if exact unexpected and beautifully-captured precisely-this-time-and-no-other type detail is what you love, then yes. 
 English niceness with a soupcon of stark-ish horror.