Two novels that capture the blitz experience in vivid and precise detail are Henry Green's (1905-73) Caught (1943) and Elizabeth Bowen's (1899-1973) The Heat of the Day (1949). Green's novel describes a group of men and women in the London Auxiliary Fire Service, charged with the task of fighting the fires that resulted from the bombings. Much of the novel deals with events leading up to the blitz, the so-called phony war period, spanning the declaration of war in 1939 and the actual military engagement in the spring of 1940, when people were cut adrift from their traditional lives but not yet involved in the war itself. The protagonist is Richard Roe, whose only son has been evacuated to the country. A loner by nature, Roe joins the Auxiliary Fire Service, where he finds himself caught, that is, trapped, by the lives of other fire fighters to whom he feels distant and alien. Part of this alienation is the inevitable product of the gap between his English, middle-class background and the working-class men and women in the service. Roe and his working-class supervisor, Pye, are at odds but coincidentally bonded by the relationship of Pye's sister to Roe's son. Pye's tragic suicide is one of the events that breaks down the distance between Roe and the other members of the service. The other is the onset of the actual bombing, which extricates Roe and his fellow workers from the limbo of waiting and gives them the freedom to perform meaningful action.

In The Heat of the Day, the protagonist Stella Rodney meets her lover, Robert, in "that first heady autumn of the London air raids." This fact immediately encloses their relationship: "Their time sat in the third place at their table. They were creatures of history whose coming together was of a nature possible in no other day--the day was inherent in the nature." The novel's greatest strength lies in its evocation of that time, in which the fellowship engendered by the blitz counterpoints the novel’s additional theme of treason: "Strangers saying  'Goodnight, good luck,' to each other at street corners as the sky first blanched, then faded with evening, each hoped not to die that night, still more not to die unknown."

At the critical moment of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair (1951), a buzz bomb scores a direct hit on the house that the protagonist Maurice and his married lover, Sarah, use for their trysts. When Maurice goes to investigate, another bomb goes off, and he is cast down the staircase, apparently dead. Sarah, a nonbeliever all her life, falls to her knees and prays, "I'll give him up forever, only let him be alive." A moment later Maurice appears, and Sarah thinks "now the agony of being without him starts." She remains true to her vow, turning Maurice, who is convinced she left him for another man, into an embittered cynic. Only after her death does Maurice discover the true cause of her rejection along with the evidence that she may have died a saint. As a result, he declares his defiant hatred for God, his victorious rival for the love of Sarah, not realizing that his hatred nullifies the atheism that had been a central feature of his life.

In radical departure from these straightforward treatments of the blitz stands Thomas Pynchon's (1937- ) Gravity's Rainbow (1973), a novel that, befitting its status as one of the founding texts of postmodernism, deconstructs the traditional conception of the aerial attacks. In its place, it offers as a plot premise the correspondence between the location of V2 strikes in various parts of London and the sexual conquests of Tyrone Slothrop, an American lieutenant assigned to work with British intelligence. He is assigned the task of determining the connection between the V2's machinery and his own. In the process, he comes to see himself and all humanity as forms of matter not all that different from the rockets. Both have been launched into space for a brief period, wired to self-destruct on impact.

The opening chapter of David Lodge's (1935- ) Out of the Shelter (1970) casts the blitz experience through the eyes of a young boy.

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