On the day the Second World War broke out, Frank White was a 12-year-old schoolboy in Manchester. On the day it ended, he was serving on a Royal Navy warship in the Indian Ocean. In 2013, he started to write this novel.

'What I wanted to do,' he says, 'was to capture that feeling of those times and remind people of what the country went through.'

'Fabulous, often funny . . . the authentic, freewheeling atmosphere of a time when all bets were off' Daily Mail

As Churchill and the nation face their darkest hour in 1940, a Lincolnshire village wakes up to a glorious summer's morning.

Following Dunkirk, the fate of the whole war will soon rest with the RAF and their desperate effort to win the Battle of Britain. If they fail, Hitler's next step will be invasion.

And as the scene comes to life before us over the next six months, this shadow of war will not disappear.

From the pub to the church, struggling single mother to the lady of the manor, the paper boy to a traumatised bomb disposal volunteer, this superb jewel of a novel portrays a community of people and weaves together their stories with passion, betrayal, intrigue and suspense.

There Was a Time is a triumph of the storyteller's art.

This edition includes a new Author's Note and additional illustrations by the author.