The diaries of Churchill’s youngest and only liv­ing daugh­ter, Mary Soames, are to be pub­lished on her 89th birth­day, Sep­tem­ber 15th, by Dou­ble­day UK, and is avail­able for ship­ment world­wide from Ama­zon UK. An e-book will also be avail­able. Amer­i­can pub­li­ca­tion will be in May 2012 by Ran­dom House in New York. The Ama­zon UK price is £16.50 ($26.50) and air­mail ship­ment to the USA costs about £7 ($11).

Much younger than her sib­lings, Mary had an idyl­lic youth, grow­ing up at Chartwell, her father’s beloved Ken­tish home, but always in the back­ground was his pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the grow­ing threat of Hitler, and in 1939 the war arrived, and with it Mary’s life was dra­mat­i­cal­ly altered. She served with the ATS, man­ning Lon­don mixed anti-air­craft bat­ter­ies, and shared her father’s grief when in July 1945, with the war almost over world­wide, he was sum­mar­i­ly relieved as Prime Min­is­ter as a result of the Gen­er­al Elec­tion. The pub­lish­er states:

…we fol­low Mary’s life through her fas­ci­nat­ing per­son­al diary, pub­lished here for the first time. Through the imme­di­a­cy of her pri­vate obser­va­tions we are drawn into a world where the ordi­nary minu­ti­ae of a packed fam­i­ly, social and roman­tic life pro­ceed against a back­ground of cat­a­clysmic events….Mary takes on her own set of pro­fes­sion­al demands while shar­ing the many anx­i­eties and stress­es brought to bear upon her fam­i­ly through her father’s posi­tion. The mutu­al love and affec­tion between Mary and her par­ents is evi­dent on every page, from her ear­li­est years at Chartwell to Winston’s defeat at the 1945 gen­er­al elec­tion, when Mary recounts her own pain and dev­as­ta­tion on her father’s behalf. At this point she meets her future hus­band, Christo­pher Soames. We are left in no doubt at the end of this charm­ing and reveal­ing mem­oir that, at twen­ty-four, Mary has lived a full life and is well pre­pared for her future as young wife and mother.

For sev­er­al years we have heard from Lady Soames as she pro­gressed through the writ­ing, a prodi­gious task for any­one her age, yet she has always been young at heart, and pos­sessed with her father’s deter­mi­na­tion to “fin­ish the job.” We take great delight in know­ing that her work is now done, and that she may “rest her paw” and take pride in anoth­er out­stand­ing Churchill lit­er­ary work to add to her many ear­li­er ones.