"Radio Girls", by Sarah Jane Stratford

Kind of fiction, and kind of not. Radio Girls is set in London, beginning in 1926, and covers the very early years of BBC Radio.

Our heroine, Maisie Musgrave (Canadian-born, New York raised, but Anglophile by nature) is fictional, but many of the characters in the book are not – John Reith (knighted in 1927) the autocratic first Director-General, and Hilda Matheson, the well-connected Director of Talks, are the two main protagonists, but many of the book's other characters were also real people.

The rising conflict between Reith and Matheson is a central theme – they had very different views on what radio could and should be aiming to achieve - but these were also very interesting times . The 1920s saw the long-sought granting of female suffrage in the U.K., and also the rise of fascism in Europe, so along with the history of the BBC is woven the social and political history of the time.

Sarah Jane Stratford is a very entertaining writer, who's done her research thoroughly – Hilda Matheson deserves her own complete biography, and I wish Sarah Jane might be the person to write it. Every character, from Reith and Matheson to the technicians are very well-drawn, sometimes with only a few words.

I enjoyed this book so much, I kept putting it aside as I approached the end, because I simply didn't want to finally put it down. It was a joy to read, and who can ask for more?