White City

The brilliant sequel to Donald Wheal's childhood memoir, World's End.

A thoroughly enjoyable read, full of anecdotes and information that bring the characters and the times to life. White City shows a refreshing pace and an awareness of the reader in its use of humour and understatement. Most of all, one gains a strong sense of Donald Wheal as a remarkable man. [He] allows the reader to share a world that is unthinkable today. This is truly a book to enjoy, but also to learn from.

Donald James Wheal is the real name of Donald James, the critically acclaimed thriller writer of Monstrum, The Fortune Teller and Vadim. As Donald Wheal he has also written The Fall of the Russian Empire and The Penguin Dictionary of the Third Reich. Donald James Wheal is the author of World's End.

On the morning of 24th February 1944 following a devastating Luftwaffe raid, Donald Wheal and his family were homeless refugees with bulging suitcases and faces blackened by soot blast. In World's End, the first part of his bestselling childhood autobiography, he told of his upbringing during the Blitz in the rough working class community which was Chelsea's World's End. The morning after the World's End bombing he realized that the ties that had bound him to the past were now broken -- a new world and a new fate awaited him. 
 
In White City he tells the story of how his family, now menaced by the V-bombs and rockets that were the last stage of London's war, were re-settled in a anonymous London suburb where later his adolescence was to began amidst post war privation, sexual yearning and first love. In these dark years the quest for new experiences took him all around Britain and finally to war-ravaged France. A testing period of National Service in Germany and Italy completed his journey to adulthood. 
 
White City is as funny, heartbreaking and engaging as World's End

World's End

A warm-hearted and moving memoir in the tradition of The Road to Nab End:

'An overwhelmingly honest account of one boy's wartime memories'

'Written to almost make you wish you had been there'

'Terrific, an insightful memoir about family love'

DONALD WHEAL is the real name of DONALD JAMES, the critically acclaimed thriller writer of Monstrum, The Fortune Teller and Vadim. As Donald Wheal he has also written The Fall of the Russian Empire and The Penguin Dictionary of the Third Reich.

World's End is the story of Donald Wheal¹s childhood in Chelsea's World's End at the height of the Second World War. 
 
Not for him the privileged bohemian world of Chelsea a few hundred yards away. Descended from rural immigrants, ladies of the night and bare-knuckle fighters, Donald Wheal¹s upbringing took place amidst grimy factories and generating plants, illegal street bookmakers, dog tracks, tenements and street walkers who plied their trade in Piccadilly and Soho. 
 
World's End is the story of how he and his family struggled free from this underclass. It is also an individual history of the Second World War, of a small boy¹s grappling with the bitter separation of evacuation, the return to an already battered London, the wonderland of bomb-damaged houses to play in, and the nights of terror as the Blitz returned.

Donald James

In this, the third appearance of Inspector Constantin Vadim leaves his native Russia for New York. Vadim finds himself caught up in the middle of a presidential election where the victory of the leading candidate is threatened by the outrageous public behaviour of his Russian wife. When someone decides the only solution is to have her killed before she loses her husband the election Constantin's innocent involvement with her pitches him straight into the middle of a murder investigation.

Donald James

Vadim

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