Two books that immediately come to mind are Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 and Tara Zahra's The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families After World War II. Judt's book is intense (900 pages) but is really the best place to start with the subject of Europe's reconstruction, and makes very clear that the wreckage of war extended after its official end. It's very textured, with lots of historical details that you can mine to build up the world of your story, in addition to providing the big picture politics. Tara Zahra's study tells the story of this wreckage through one specific aspect of reconstruction— the struggle to reunite children and families after the war.

You might also be interested in A Woman in Berlin (republished recently by Virago), the anonymous diary of a Berlin journalist in the last days of the war— will give you an idea of what the city was recovering from.

The short answer is that, although some of the immediate postwar relief efforts (eg, UNRRA— the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) had begun to wrap up in 1947, the continent was and remained shattered by war. Sweden might have escaped some of this, but Germany was still occupied: the Soviet Union, France, the US, and the UK each had a zone of occupation in Germany (the latter three didn't merge to become West Germany until 1949). Germans had rebuilt most of their bombed-out and destroyed railways, Judt tells us, but the country lacked a functioning economy apart from the black market. Most countries were still contending with rationing and food shortages; in Britain, rationing actually increased. And the winter of 1946-1947 was one of the most bitterly cold winters on record. Of course, social class and background also go a long way towards determining normalcy or not— displaced persons and refugees had a much harder time getting back to normal than someone left relatively 'unscathed' by war.