Author(s): Fannie Flagg

Fiction

With all the men off to war, it's up to the Jurdabralinski sisters to keep the family business going. They must learn men's work, from fixing flats to driving the tow truck, but they also have their own ideas. Wearing smart little caps and short skirts with fringes, they fly round the forecourt on roller skates and The All-Girl's Filling Station is born. But the sisters' peace doesn't last long, as one by one they are invited to join the war effort as pilots. Mrs Sookie Earl of Clear Point, Alabama, doesn't know any of this. She doesn't know a thing about Poland, or fleeing the Russians or the extraordinary courage of the flying wartime heroines known as the WASPS. In fact, the only war she knows about is the one she's waging, and losing, against the Blue Jays in her garden. But then one day a package arrives. Its contents knock Sookie sideways. Feeling like a stranger in her own life, Sookie's search for answers takes her back to the 1940s, an irrepressible family called the Jurdabralinskis and four sisters whose wartime adventures force them to reimagine who they are, and what they are capable of.