Another Time and Place: A Novel of World War II

“Very emotional and beautiful” – Reader review

England, 1944. Anna Pilgrim keeps a photograph on her bedside table – a chance encounter pressed into paper, the last proof that Tom Blake existed in her life before the war in Europe claimed him.

When munitions worker Anna Pilgrim meets American pilot Tom Blake by chance on a winter afternoon, she isn't looking for love. But what begins as a single stolen afternoon becomes something neither of them expected. To celebrate, they sit together in a photographer's studio, two people sealing a fragile moment into permanence.

Then Tom fails to return from a mission over Europe, and the photograph is all Anna has left.

As weeks stretch into months, Anna waits without news, carrying the weight of what they shared and the growing impossibility of her situation. Facing the whispered judgments of neighbours and the cold manipulations of a mother who has already decided her daughter’s future, she understands the particular cruelty of hope: that it costs everything to hold on to, and more to let it go.

What she doesn't know is that Tom is alive, and making his way home through occupied Europe one dangerous mile at a time. Nor that in the moments when the fear and the exhaustion threaten to finish what the war started, it is the memory of Anna – and the photograph he carries – that keeps him moving.

But Anna's mother has not been idle. With her daughter's future growing harder to conceal and a respectable English match waiting in the wings, she has taken matters into her own hands. And what she has hidden may cost Anna everything.

In a world where the wrong silence can devastate as surely as the war, hope is not a comfort. It is an act of defiance.

From war-weary England to the treacherous roads of occupied Europe, Another Time and Place is a story about what we hold onto when everything is trying to make us let go.

“I did not want it to end ... I wanted this story to continue for at least another thousand pages” – Reader review

“Perfectly blended mix of history and love story” – Reader review

“A fast paced plot and a powerful love story” – Reader review

“Easy to read, hard to set down” – Reader review