Hello book friends,

Welcome to the blog tour for This Lovely City by Louise Hare

This is a fabulous murder mystery set in post war Britain, and the cover is just gorgeous!

My Review

1948, the war is finally over and bombed out Britain is set to rebuild, but to that they need people in London after so many were lost in the war, so the government send an invitation to its colonies asking for workers, in exchange for their help, these lucky people will be helped with accommodation and be part of something amazing!

Except, it doesn’t quite work out like that.

Jazz musician Lawrie Matthews travels from Jamaica to the UK along with hundreds of other people on the Empire Windrush, thinking that his life was going to start, there was going to be so many different things for him to do, jobs for him to choose, friends for him to make, he was a British citizen now, and people were going to love him.

Unfortunately, when the ship arrives, it seems that London wasn’t ready at all for the people that they had invited, and had done very little to accommodate them, on arrival they are escorted to an old bomb shelter and told this is where they will be staying until further accommodation was provided!

After eventually being housed, Lawrie gets a job as a Postman, and falls in love with a girl called Evie, who is a neighbour.

Lawrie loves his job, and in the evenings he plays in a Jazz band around SoHo, but what he doesn’t love is the blatant racism towards him and his friends, considering they were there to help, Lawrie doesn’t feel appreciated at all, and even though he is now a British citizen, it doesn’t matter, as the colour of his skin says otherwise!

While doing his post round one morning, Lawrie makes an awful discovery, that sets the future plans that he has with Evie on very thin ice.

This was at times a very hard hitting book mixed in with the mystery, to see all of these people being treated so badly just because of the colour of their skin makes me so angry, and even more so because of the Windrush situation that came to light in the news back in 2018 and is still going on now.

Louise Hare has managed to create a very atmospheric story and I could almost hear the Jazz band, and smell the smoky bars as I listened to this audiobook

Narrated By Theo Solomon and Karise Yansen who did a wonderful job recreating the character voices, I will certainly look for other books they have narrated.