By acclaimed Orwell biographer D. J. Taylor, this is the story of the Lost Girls, the missing link between the first wave of newly-liberated young women of the post-Great War era and Dionysiac free-for-all of the 1960s.

'Immersive, intense and dense with detail, Taylor's latest work is a wonderfully niche and pointed take on lost girls from a lost era; a real-life wartime drama, on an intricate and intimate scale' Irish Times

'Lost girls' was the name given to the young women at large in Blitz-era literary London. Lost Girls concentrates on just four: Lys Lubbock, Sonia Brownell, Barbara Skelton and Janetta Woolley. Chic, glamorous and bohemian, they cut a swathe through English cultural life in the 1940s. One of them married George Orwell. Another became the mistress of the King of Egypt. All of them were associated with the decade's most celebrated literary magazine, Horizon, and its charismatic editor Cyril Connolly.

Bright, beautiful, independent-minded women with tough upbringings behind them, the Lost Girls were creatures of the volatile landscape through which they moved. Theirs was the world of the buzz bomb, the cocktail party behind blackout curtains, of living for the moment and snatching at pleasure before it disappeared.

The Lost Girls remain a genuine missing link between the first wave of newly-liberated young women of the post-Great War era and the Dionysiac free-for-all of the 1960s. Hectic, passionate and at times unexpectedly poignant, this is their story.

'Entertaining' Spectator
'Deliciously readable' Financial Times
'Enticing' The Tablet
'Lively, perceptive and gossip-strewn' The New Criterion
'Insightful' Wall Street Journal
'Poignant' London Review of Books

DJ Taylor, who has previously written about the bright young things of the interwar years, makes a convincing case for seeing Sonia and her peers as a racier, tougher and far more intelligent group than has previously been allowed