ShortBookandScribes #BookReview – A Baby for the Home Front Girls by Susanna Bavin

Posted on 5th December 2025 By Nicola

A Baby for the Home Front Girls by Susanna Bavin is published by Bookouture and is available now. I purchased my own copy of the book.

Manchester, 1942: With war raging in the skies, can the Home Front girls still find the happiness they so deserve?

When Betty and her best friend Sally discover a baby tucked in a blanket amongst the rubble at the Manchester Salvage Depot, they can barely believe their eyes. As Betty holds the baby in her arms, she feels a familiar longing stir in her chest. Might she and her husband be allowed to care for this abandoned child, and create the family they have always longed for?

Sally is shocked when she realizes she too has news: she’s pregnant and the two friends begin planning for the new arrival. But with her husband Andrew serving overseas, and Sally’s health a cause for concern, she must do everything she can to care for the precious life inside her.

When the grandparents of the abandoned baby are found, Betty’s heart breaks. She has grown to love this child as if she was her own, and she’ll do whatever it takes to provide a safe home for this baby. Then Sally’s health takes a dramatic turn for the worse, and an anxious night is spent waiting for news as the residents of Star House rally to support one another.

With two precious lives to fight for, the future feels more perilous than ever before. Will Betty finally become the mother she has always wanted to be? And will Sally be able to give her husband the most precious homecoming gift of all?

This fifth and final book in The Home Front Girls series is an absolutely gripping and heart-wrenching romantic saga. Perfect for fans of Pam Howes, Rosie Clarke and Vicky Beeby.

A Baby for the Home Front Girls is the fifth and final instalment in the Home Front Girls series which follows the lives of three girls, Sally, Betty and Lorna, as they do important work at the salvage depot, repurposing items to help the war effort in many unexpected ways.

The girls are moving on with their lives, with all three of them now married and the natural next step is children. When Betty finds a newborn baby abandoned at the depot she and her husband Samuel decide they want to care for her. With this baby and Sally’s new pregnancy, babies are very much at the forefront of this book. Of course, nothing runs totally smoothly but the series ends with, if not quite happy ever afters given that the war is still raging, at least with happiness for each of the main characters.

I’m going to miss them all, including other standout characters such as Mrs Beaumont, the Star House landlady, and Deborah, Sally’s childhood friend whose own story is only just beginning. I don’t really want to let them all go but I must and I’m very happy to have had the pleasure of reading five absolutely lovely books featuring them and their wartime heroics, both when quietly going about their day to day salvage work and when called upon to help in other ways, such as assisting with rescue attempts.

Susanna Bavin writes sagas beautifully and emotively, with all the joys and sadness that life during wartime brings. I particularly liked the tiny nods to characters and locations in her other books (as Maisie Thomas) and got quite excited when Dunbars Hotel was mentioned. A Baby for the Home Front Girls is a delightful and uplifting book and I recommend it and the series as a whole to anyone who loves reading about life on the home front.

Susanna Bavin writes stories with strong female characters, set in times when women needed determination and vision to make their mark. She loves domestic history and costume history and is fascinated by the legal position of women in the past.

She has written 4 standalone sagas and a WW2 saga series, The Home Front Girls. She is currently working on a new WW2 saga series.

She also writes as Polly Heron (The Surplus Girls 1920s saga series) and Maisie Thomas (The Railway Girls WW2 saga series, and The Wartime Hotel WW2 saga series).

Susanna lives on the beautiful North Wales coast with her husband and their two rescue cats. She is originally from Chorlton-cum-Hardy in Manchester, where her family has lived for several generations and which provides the setting for her family sagas.