In the wake of the Fire

Dai Williams grew up in a Welsh fishing village, the son of a traumatised Great War veteran. Colette Billings was raised in a Cheltenham drawing room, taught that people like Dai simply didn't exist in her world.

As a Spitfire pilot flying from Biggin Hill, Dai battles the enemy over the burning Channel. Seventy-six steps below ground at RAF Uxbridge, Colette plots his Squadron's movements on the Operations Room table, tracking every aircraft, calculating every loss. Between sorties and shifts, between combat and crisis, something unexpected takes root.

But the war that brought them together threatens to tear them apart. Class barriers don't vanish in fire; they only burn differently. And in the autumn of 1940, survival itself is a luxury neither can guarantee.

In the Wake of Fire is a story of two lives colliding across the deepest divides of the old world, forged together in the fire of Britain's darkest hour - written by a former Station Commander of RAF Uxbridge, whose own office once stood above the very Bunker where Colette works.