CLOUDS OF LOVE AND WAR

By the author of over 30 books who was awarded an OBE for Services to Literature, this book shows an acute understanding of the contradictions people felt during the war. Occasionally panoramic and more often intimate, Rachel Billington balances a detailed and highly researched picture of the life of an RAF Spitfire pilot with the travails and ambitions of a young woman too often on her own. The result is both a gripping story of war and a sensitive love story through the connecting stories of these young people and their wider families, and against a background of southern county airfields, London, Oxford, Dorset and France. Billington brings the world of wartime England, now over 80 years in the past, back to life. The writer herself lives with her husband in London and in the oldest continuously inhabited house in Dorset. This experience novelist always keeps us guessing how her characters will end up. 352pp, paperback.