The Dearest And The Best

'Thomas just keeps on giving fiction a good name' Daily Mail

Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, 1931, Leslie Thomas is the son of a sailor who was lost of sea in 1943.His boyhood in an orphanage is evoked in This Time Next Week published in 1964.At sixteen, he became a reporter, before going on to do his national service.He won worldwide acclaim with his bestselling novel The Virgin Soldiers, which has achieved international sales of over two million copies.

In the spring of 1940, the spectre of war turned into grim reality. 
 
And on the English home front, men, women and children found themselves swept into a maelstrom of fear and uncertainty while events abroad led inexorably from the debacles of Norway and Dunkirk to the horror and glory of the Battle of Britain. 
 
For the Lovatt family - James, seconded on a hush-hush assignment to work with Churchill, and his brother Harry, a naval officer - for Bess Spofford, Joanne Schorner, Graham Smit and all the inhabitants of the history villages of the New Forest, it was the beginning of the most bizarre, funny and tragic episode of their lives.

Waiting For The Day

A DRAMATIC AND MOVING STORY OF THE INCREDIBLE D-DAY LANDINGS FROM THE WELL-KNOWN WRITER OF WARTIME FICTION

Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, 1931, Leslie Thomas is the son of a sailor who was lost of sea in 1943. His boyhood in an orphanage is evoked in This Time Next Week published in 1964. At sixteen, he became a reporter, before going on to do his national service. He won worldwide acclaim with his bestselling novel The Virgin Soldiers, which has achieved international sales of over two million copies. Waiting for the Day is his twenty-eighth novel.

Mid-winter, 1943. Britain is gripped by intense cold and in the darkest days of the war. It is six months before D-Day and the battle to liberate Nazi-occupied Europe. 
 
RAF officer Martin Paget is returning home for Christmas He has been on covert operations in France and knows he has to return there. While in England, he rediscovers a passion that he thought was long over. 
 
In a freezing hut on Salisbury Plain, Sergeant Harris's mind is occupied by questions of just how his young and ebullient wife is coping with their separation. His troops are training for landing on the shores of Normandy. 
 
US officer Harry Miller arrives in Somerset where his American division has set up its headquarters. His affair with an Englishwoman is both bittersweet and potentially dangerous. 
 
Enjoying fishing off the coast of occupied Jersey is German cook sergeant Fred Weber. He believes he has found a sort of peace in the midst of the terrible conflict. But his calm is soon to be shattered as his war takes on a violent twist... 
 
Each man is heading inexorably towards the beaches of France where the great battle will begin...

Chloe's Song

The new tale of love and life, rich with humour and pathos, from our best loved storyteller. From the prison cell where Chloe Smith, 43, is awaiting trial for the merciful murder of the only man who ever loved her with honesty, she recalls the men in her life who lied to her. She remembers her adored father, who drank too much; the loss of her virginity at Stonehenge to a schoolboy, her marriage to petty crook Zane Tomkins, the Isle of Wight ferryman who said he was a lonely deep sea sailor, the young priest who said he loved her but left to establish a church for men, or the lighthouse keeper who shouted in his sleep-all these men, and many others, have let Chloe down. Chloe`s Song is the story of one woman`s quest to get what every woman wants-a man who tells the truth.

The Adventures of Goodnight and Loving

Leslie Thomas was born in 1931 in Newport, Monmouthshire, the son of a sailor who was lost at sea in 1943. His boyhood in an orphanage is evoked in This Time Next Week, published in 1964. At sixteen he became a reporter, before going on to do his National Service. His novels include: The Virgin Soldiers, Orange Wednesday, The Love Beach, Come to the War, His Lordship and The Man with the Power.

When George Goodnight, a lawyer on the staff of a London newspaper, finds his marriage has gone sour, his family holiday is cancelled and his car, broken down on the motorway, has been stolen, he walks through a gate in a fence on a summer's day in the middle of England. What he doesn't know, as he takes his first light steps across the sunlit meadows near the tiny village of Somerbourne Magna, is that he is embarking on a course that will take him far away from the country, the surroundings and the way of life he has always known. He is embarking on a journey that will eventually take him to the other side of the world. 
 
As in his earlier books, Arthur McCann and All His Women, Bare Nell and Ormerod's Landing, Leslie Thomas shows himself to be a master of the sustained narrative novel of adventure and romance as he evokes his hero's fitful progress round the world. Along the way George has close encounters with storms at sea and in the air; with poverty and despair; with true love and exotic passion. He spends Christmas in prison, encounters a substitute for the son he never had and tracks down a girl who was swopped at birth for some rare stamps. Always he moves on. 
 
Sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious, sometimes alarming, the adventures of George Goodnight and his shadowy alter ego, Oliver Loving, represent stages in what is both a quest for excitement and love and a haunting evocation of what happens when a man starts running away from life and can't stop. The descriptions of the cities and villages George travels to and the extraordinary cast of people he encounters are sparkling and authentic. This long, swirling novel, with comedy in its buttonhole and pathos at its heart, is a tour de force and wonderfully enthralling read.

The Complete Dangerous Davies

Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, in 1931, Leslie Thomas is the son of a sailor who was lost at sea in 1943. His boyhood in an orphanage is evoked in This Time Next Week, published in 1964. At sixteen he became a reporter, before going on to do his national service. 
 
He won worldwide acclaim with his bestselling novel The Virgin Soldiers, which came out of his experiences in Malaya as a national serviceman. First published in 1966, it has achieved an international sale of over two million copies. 
 
Since then, Leslie Thomas has written over twenty other novels including Tropic of Ruislip, The Magic Army, The Dearest and the Best, The Loves and Journeys of Revolving Jones, Arrivals and Departures, three books featuring Dangerous Davies and, most recently, Running Away. 
 
He lives in Sailsbury, Wiltshire.

As plain-clothes men go, Dangerous Davies looks like a non-starter. The small fry of petty larceny and minor disturbances in the backwaters of north-west London are his daily round. His philosophising Welsh drinking companion Mod, his outsized and unruly dog Kitty, his quarrels with his landlady Mrs Fulljames - none of these bodes well for the efficient solving of crimes and outwitting of villainy. But Davies is encouraged by his beautiful friend Jemma, and every so often he stumbles upon something really big. 
 
Gathered together for the first time in one volume, here are Leslie Thomas's three books about the most endearing comic hero he has ever created.

Orders For New York

Leslie Thomas was born in 1931 in Newport, Monmouthshire, the son of a sailor who was lost at sea in 1943. His boyhood in an orphanage is evoked in This Time Next Week, published in 1964. At sixteen he became a reporter, before going on to do his National Service. His novels include: The Virgin Soldiers, Orange Wednesday, The Love Beach, Come to the War, His Lordship and The Man with the Power.

They came on a distant, secret night, armed and ready to kill. Their ghosts are still with us today. 
 
In June 1942 a party of German saboteurs landed by submarine in the United States of America. They were betrayed and executed within eight weeks of their landing. Their treacherous leader served a prison sentence and then disappeared. 
 
Orders for New York takes this historical fact as its starting point and tells the story of Michael Findlater, a British journalist who is in the USA researching for a book. Invited to meet his ex-wife Madelaine for the first time since their divorce and to see his twelve-year-old daughter, Findlater finds he is in fact being recruited for a well-paid secret mission. 
 
Madelaine's father-in-law, a wealthy and successful newspaper proprietor, wants him to take on theassignment of finding the vanished Nazi saboteur, Peter Karl Hine, and writing his story. Spurred on partly by the huge reward on offer and partly by curiosity, Findlater embarks on his quest and rapidly discovers that there are ruthless parties involved, who will stop at nothing to prevent him. 
 
This is an enthralling and astonishing new novel, from the author of The Magic Army and The Adventures of Goodnight and Loving.

Leslie Thomas

[A] searing and thoroughly fascinating exploration of the complex wildlife of female sexuality and desire.

Historians of the Second World War have hitherto omitted to mention that the first British raid on German-occupied France took place within four months of Dunkirk. It happened at midnight on September 21st, 1940, the landing being made at the small fishing town of Granville, in Normandy. The landing party consisted of a detective-sergeant of the Metropolitan Police (V Division), a young French woman schoolteacher and an ugly mongrel dog named Formidable. They were considerately brought ashore by the Germans themselves. 
 
George Ormerod was the detective sergeant in question, not the most imaginative of policemen, but, true to his name, most resolute in his investigations. (An ormer is a notably tenacious shell-fish of the English Channel.) While the war is being lost all around him, Ormerod remains obsessed with the mundane murder of a young woman in Wandsworth, even pursuing his investigations amongst the returning and bewildered troops. 
 
How the investigation blazed a savage trail through rural Normandy and led to Nazi-occupied Paris, and how Marie- Thérèse Velin and her often ruthless Resistance allies become involved with George Ormerod are questions Leslie Thomas answers as his tale unfolds. In Ormerod's Landing, an exciting and ironic tale of Britain and France in the early years of the war, he once again creates a tender, farcical world in which his unique humour and irony flourish.

Leslie Thomas

Praise for Ormerod's Landing

[A] searing and thoroughly fascinating exploration of the complex wildlife of female sexuality and desire.

Books by Leslie Thomas

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