'The real war started for me today.' So begins the diary of 18-year-old Mary Mulry, a young Irish nurse, newly arrived in London in 1940. Over the next seven years she witnesses many of the pivotal events of the war at first hand.

In London during the Blitz she sees a young woman die after a botched abortion, narrowly escapes from the bombing of the Alexandra Hotel, and nurses critically ill children during bombing raids in Woolwich. In Normandy in 1944, arriving on the heels of the D-Day invasion, she nurses Allied soldiers and German prisoners of war. In war-torn Belgium, she records harrowing stories of casualties from the Battle of Arnhem.

In these extraordinary diaries we see a young woman coming of age, falling in and out of love several times over. ('I always seem to be saying good-bye to men whom I might have loved had there been enough time,' she writes.) She eventually meets and falls in love with a young British Army officer and agrees to marry him two weeks later. The diary ends in Hamburg in 1947 with the birth of her son.

Mary's distinctive voice, sharp wit, rebellious spirit, and irrepressible personality make her diary entries feel just as immediate, dramatic and moving today as when they were first written 70 years ago.