A Penny a Shell

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>A story of resilience friendship and the hidden cost of war-perfect for readers of historical fiction women's history and true untold stories.</p>