For fifty years Mollie Panter-Downes's name was associated with The New Yorker, for which she wrote over thirty short stories; of the twenty-one in Good Evening, Mrs Craven, written between 1939 and 1944, only two had ever been reprinted – these very English stories have, until now, been unavailable to English readers.
Exploring most aspects of English domestic life during the Second World War, they are about separation, sewing parties, fear, evacuees sent to the country, obsession with food, the social revolutions of wartime.