The War That Saved My Life

The War That Saved My Life is a children's historical novel by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, published by Dial Books for Young Readers in 2015 and followed by a sequel. It is set in England at the start of the Second World War and tells its story in the close first person of Ada, a ten-year-old whose mother is physically abusive and hides her from the neighbours.

Ada has spent her life in one room, punished by being locked in a cabinet under the sink and used as a servant by her mother. When the government evacuates children from London in September 1939 she takes her brother and goes with them, and the two are placed with Susan Smith, a reluctant and grieving woman in a village where nobody quite knows what to do with them.

The book's subject is what a child learns when she is finally allowed a life: Ada teaches herself to ride, learns to read, and begins to trust an adult, while the war continues overhead and the threat of her mother does not go away. Bradley based the setting on the official evacuation that moved hundreds of thousands of children out of the cities.