Rue End Street: The sequel to Mavis’s Shoe

Author: Sue Reid Sexton

This is the story of a young girl who is coming to terms with changes in her family she is not ready for. A passionate story, told with warmth and conviction set in Greenock and Carbeth in the Second World War.

It is September 1943, more than two years since Lenny’s world was devastated by the Clydebank Blitz and she and her family are safe in the beautiful green hut community of Carbeth, Scotland. But as the tides of war turn and Italy joins the Allies to fight the Nazis, the fists of war and fear are set to grab Lenny once more. Adversity threatens each moment, and Lenny is about to lose her closest ally.

Told the family must move back to Clydebank with its smoke and factories and now overcrowded, teeming dwellings, Lenny refuses to give up her rural sanctuary. When her mother Peggy returns to Clydebank for a job, leaving Lenny to become a little mother to her siblings, Lenny lies about her age to look for work locally. But this new turn is bewildering. Exhausted, Lenny seizes on news of her father, convinced that if only she can discover the truth about where he is, if only she can find him, she can make their family complete again. But no-one will meet her eye.

Desperate, and in need of a happy ending, Lenny sets out, but all is not as she hopes… Her steps take her the length of the great Clyde estuary, and into new dangers in the vast, dark, threatening and adult war-time ports of Helensburgh and Greenock ...

Enjoy this new book, the sequel to

Mavis’s Shoe, a harrowing account of the bombing of Clydebank in March 1941.

Praise for Mavis’s Shoe:

"This haunting, beautifully-written blend of fact and fiction captures the strength of humanity, the courage in adversity and the heartbreaking loss caused by one
of the most tragic episodes in our nation’s history." The Daily Record

"A story of courage and survival as well as a highly readable and vivid account of one of Scotland’s worst wartime disasters." The Scots Magazine

"A remarkable story of a young girl’s survival of the aftermath of the 1941 Clydebank blitz." BooksfromScotland.com

See the eBook here.