Librería Samer Atenea
Librería Aciertas (Toledo)
Kálamo Books
Librería Perelló (Valencia)
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Donde los libros
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
On a winter night in 1916, inside the sprawling Barnbow munitions factory near Leeds, hundreds of women filed into Room 42 to fill shells for the Western Front. By 10:27 p.m., thirty-five of them would never walk back out.A Penny a Shell follows one day in the lives of three of those women-Eliza Wren, a charge hand carrying the weight of her family’s survival; Sarah Jennings, a sharp-tongued farm labourer with a secret she can no longer outrun; and Lucy Atkinson, a timid seventeen-year-old still grieving her brother killed at the Somme. Their paths cross on the factory benches where danger is constant, mistakes are costly, and pressure for output never stops.Across twenty-four hours, the novel traces their working-class lives at home and on the line: the long walks in the dark, the aching exhaustion, the jokes and songs on the train, the quiet fears they never say aloud. Through the grit of industrial wartime Britain-TNT poisoning, relentless shifts, and the unspoken grief carried by women on the home front-the story builds toward the real explosion that devastated Room 42 on 5 December 1916.Meticulously researched and inspired by real testimonies, factory records, and the author’s own family history, A Penny a Shell honours the courage, sacrifices, and unseen labour of the women who kept the war machine running.A story of resilience, friendship, and the hidden cost of war-perfect for readers of historical fiction, women’s history, and true untold stories.
