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.

That Old Gang of Mine

At four-thirty one January afternoon a bus returning to Miami and Fort Lauderdale containing tourists who have been visiting a Seminole Indian Reservation is held up at gunpoint by five hooded gangsters. The combined ages of the 5 robbers total 320 years… 
 
Leslie Thomas’s latest novel is the hilarious account of the adventures of a group of elderly gangsters in Florida – the Ocean Drive Delinquent Society, known as the ODDS for short. The members include Ari the Greek – he of the legendary nose; K-K-K-Katy, the aging dancing girl who can still manage a high kick; and Molly Mandy, whose metal detector uncovers the gang’s arms cache – and it’s the one and only bullet. 
 
Along with Sidewalk Joe, Lou the Barbender, and one or two more, they form a daring band who have little to lose, and their audacious – and frequently unsuccessful – enterprises soon have Captain Salvatore of the local police baffled. Salvatore calls in an elderly private eye, George Zaharran, to help him out, but instead of simplifying the mystery, Zaharran’s presence serves only to multiply it. 
 
That Old Gang of Mine is both a riotous adventure and an affectionate evocation of the geriatric gang’s bond with the beautiful girl and two younger men who lead it. It is wholly delightful book form the pen of one of England’s funniest storytellers.

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.

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.

Dangerous Davies and The Lonely Heart

'Thomas's skill in yoking unlikely elements together is liitle short of hilarious. Dialogue skips along, people are roundly sketched, places set a vivid mood. Thomas. . . midway between Archer and Amis, keeps on giving fiction a good name. ' Mail on Sunday

Thomas's skill in yoking unlikely elements together is little short of hilarious. Dialogue skips along, people are roundly sketched, places set a vivid mood. Thomas... midway between Archer and Amis, keeps on giving fiction a good name

Recomended to anyone who enjoys a good detective yarn with plenty of laughs

Dangerous is back... 
 
In this, the fourth of Leslie Thomas's novels about Dangerous Davies, the last detective, Davies has retired from the Metropolitan Police and set up as a private eye. 
 
Cases are hard to come by until he is aburptly thrown into two mysteries - the murders of women answering lonely hearts advertisements, and the disappearance of a young girl student, a psychologist and a secret worth millions. But can Davies solve any of the mysteries and will his new career as a private detective be a success? 
 
People with the amazing characters that are the trademark of any book by Leslie Thomas, this is a highly original detective story that is as ingenious as it is touching and funny.

Soldiers and Lovers

A wonderfully touching tale of wartime love lost and rediscovered.

Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, 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 has achieved international sales of over four million copies. In 2005, Leslie Thomas was awarded an OBE for Services to Literature.

In a sunlit, secret valley in the green mountains of central Italy, two people meet away from the horrors and clamour of battle. David Hopkins, a young fisherman from west Wales and Kate Medhurst, from a genteel town in the Thames Valley, embark upon an idyllic love affair away from the conflict that surrounds them. However, they cannot escape the war forever, and when they are targeted by a single enemy aeroplane their dreams are destroyed. 
 
Weeks later, Hopkins wakes up in a Russian hospital in Vienna where he's slowly recovering from serious wounds - with no recollection of the past. Eventually, transferred to an American hospital and then repatriated to Britain, Hopkins reluctantly returns to Wales. 
 
And there, alone and haunted by the months he cannot remember, Hopkins embarks upon a journey of rediscovery...

Dover Beach

Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, 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 has achieved international sales of over two million copies. Dover Beach is his twenty-ninth novel. In 2005, Leslie Thomas was awarded an OBE for services to literature. Leslie Thomas was awarded an OBE for services to literature in 2005.

Summer 1940. The evacuation of Dunkirk proves that the British can rise to a challenge, even against seemingly insurmountable odds. But now the soldiers walk the streets of Dover, even wandering through Woolworths store, and take weary turns on the town's skating rink. 
 
Life, despite the threat of invasion and the reality of bombing, must go on and people must take comfort where they find it. Toby Hendry, a fighter pilot, is awaiting orders when he meets Giselle, a young Frenchwoman who took the chance to flee occupied France with the English troops. Their love affair feels like a summer idyll, but can it withstand the forces of war? 
 
Meanwhile, reserve naval commander Paul Instow has been called up to fight in a war for which he feels too old. Distracting him from his worries is Molly, a young Dover prostitute. Their relationship is tender and happy, but is this a love born from desperation or could it be something more permanent? 
 
And then there are Harold, Spots and Boot, three boys desperate to fight the German invaders, armed only with catapults and a stolen Bren gun... 
 
In Dover Beach Thomas chronicles the lives and loves of ordinary people in besiged Britain during these tense, but curiously elated days.

In My Wildest Dreams

Leslie Thomas's classic autobiography, with a new introduction, reissued to coincide with his 75th year

'Scenes rivalling the best of D. H. Lawrence'

'Splendidly conveys...compassion, excitement, entertainment'

Vividly readable... Leslie Thomas is one of nature's life enchancers

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. In 2005, Leslie Thomas received an OBE for services to literature.

From Barnardo boy to original virgin soldier; from apprentice journalist in London's Fleet Street to famous novelist... 
 
At times funny, at times sad, but always honest and utterly compulsive, Leslie Thomas's story is straight out of fiction. As an orphan, he picked his way through the rubble of post-war Britain and was sent on national service to the Far East. Later he became a Fleet Street reporter, with hilarious experiences to relate, and then became the bestselling author of The Virgin Soldiers - the novel that, although scandalous in its day, is now recognised as a classic of its kind. He is also the creator of Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective, which has been adapted into a popular television series. In 2005, Leslie Thomas was awarded an OBE for services to literature. 
 
With a new introduction for this edition, this is an amazing story, and Leslie Thomas's magic touch brings it crackling to life with warmth, wit and humour.

Onward Virgin Soldiers

The triumphant return of The Virgin Soldier!

'A follow-up to the wildyly successful The Virgin Soldiers...an excellent, amusing read'

'Not for maiden aunts - the sex scenes are quite explicit!'

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. His next novel, Dover Beach, will be published by William Heinemann in November 2005.

Bursting with life and bawdy humour, National Serviceman Brigg is now a Regular Army sergeant defending the Empire in the beds and bars of Hong Kong. 
 
Peace-time diversions include sensual fireworks with a pair of delicious Chinese twins and a tender, erotic affair with the lonely wife of an American serviceman.

Stand Up Virgin Soldiers

The final instalment in the Virgin Soldiers trilogy - Leslie Thomas's best-known novel

Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, 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 has achieved international sales of over two million copies. His next novel, Dover Beach, will be published by William Heinemann in November 2005.

The worst has happened. On the eve of their return to Blighty, Brigg and his fellow National Servicemen find themselves sentenced to another six months in Panglin Barracks... 
 
Many of the surviving characters from The Virgin Soldiers live again in these pages: dogged Tasker, the odious Sergeant Wellbeloved, the vulnerable Colonel Bromley Pickering and the comically touching Juicy Lucy. 
 
But we encounter new characters too: the fanatical and demented Lieutenant Grainger; the endearing Welshman, Morris Morris - strong as a horse but bafflingly buxom; US Private Clay - mysteriously lost in transit by the American Army; and last, but not least, Bernice Harrison, the sporting nurse who threatens to replace the wayward Lucy in Brigg's affections...

The Virgin Soldiers

Leslie Thomas's best-known and most enduring novel, published for the first time in Arrow Books and repackaged in a beautiful new look for a new audience.

'It rained a lot and steamed when the sun shone. It was always hot. But it was safe...' 
 
One way or another the Communist guerrilla war in Malaya kept a whole British army occupied from 1948 until 1952. They were the virgin soldiers. Idle, homesick, afraid, bored, oversexed and unsatisfied. 
 
A young virgin like Brigg had to grab his fun while and where he could - in the Liberty Club, in Juicy Lucy's flat or up in Phillipa's room - in one frantic attempt at living before he died or got demobbed...

The Magic Army

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

It's bawdy, funny, sad and sometimes sorry and it brought those times vividly back

The war, they said, would be over by Christmas. That was in 1939, and it is now January 1944. An exhausted Britain faces another year of conflict. 
 
Meanwhile, small coastal villages in Devon are facing an invasion from an army just as foreign as that of the Germans. The Americans are smart, well-fed and well-equipped, and they have swept the bewildered citizens of South Devon from their homes in deadly earnest rehearsal for D-Day. 
 
As the beaches echo to the sound of bullets and the local church to the strains of Glenn Miller, Americans and English are thrown together with sometimes hilarious, sometimes painful and puzzling results.

Dangerous In Love

A major new ITV series based on characters from Leslie Thomas's novels following the misadventures of the hapless detective, Dangerous Davies,to be screened in February 2004

Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, 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 has achieved international sales of over four million copies. Waiting for the Day, his twenty-eighth novel published to great acclaim in hardback in November 2003, will be published in paperback in time for the sixtieth anniversary of the D-Day landings in June 2004.

A walk through Kensal Green Cemetery, a meat pie in the greasy spoon, a weekend away complete with flannel pyjamas - Dangerous Davies knows how to treat the woman he loves. 
 
Detective Constable Davies has two things on his mind: Jemma Duval, the beautiful, black, hymn-singing social worker, and 'Lofty' Brock, the harmless old eccentric who drowned in the canal. To prove that Lofty's death was no accident, our hero sets out to do some undercover detective work. He soon discovers that something sinister is going on. Something that requires intuition, dedication, brilliant deduction - and a timely blow with a blunt instrument.

Dangerous Davies

This bestselling detective story is now a brand-new ITV comedy drama                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  e

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 has achieved an international sale of over two million copies.  His most recent novel is Other Times, which charts the exploits of a small group of soldiers at the outbreak of World War II.

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 the outwitting of villainy.  But Davies is encouraged by his beautiful friend Jemma, and every so often he stumbles upon something really big.

Other Times

There are those who will think of this story as a tale from history; to others it will seem that it happened only yesterday

A tour de force of imagination and storytelling... I cannot recommend it highly enough

Thomas has the rare ability to recreate the very sounds and smells and atmosphere of a long-lost world... One of the most satisfying reads in years

When it comes to telling a thoroughly good tale, dew do it better than former Barnardo boy Leslie Thomas... a surefire winner

At the start of the war in 1939 James Bevan is a junior officer approaching middle-age, attached to a small anti-aircraft unit on the south coast. 
 
Abandoned by his wife, the soldiers he command are his family: Bairnsfather, whose sexual encounters with his girl friend Muriel take place in an air-raid shelter; Cartwright, trying to keep two women on his gunner's pay of a shilling a day; Hignet, cosily educating himself in the orderly room. It is a rude awakening when they are called upon for the real war. 
 
Hugely absorbing, rich and rewarding, Other Times brims with history and experience, love, sorrow and humour.

Tropic Of Ruislip

TROPIC OF RUISLIP is a sage for life on a modern executive housing estate, seething with the fears, snobbereis, frustrations and lusts of well-heeled young couples trundling uneasily towards middle age.

Kensington Heights

Frank Inigo Savage simply wants to be alone and the top flat of Kensington Heights seems just the place. Until the other bizarre and eccentric inhabitants of the building start arriving on his doorstep. 
 
And the Savage gets a visit from a homeless waif he meets in the local launderette called Korky. 
 
Korky's intrusion on Savage's private world alters his whole existence. High above the London rooftops this strange and contradictory relationship blooms like an improbable flower and Savage begins to realise that the world can creep under even the most firmly closed doors. 
 
'As ever in a Thomas novel, we constantly shift from tears to laughter and back again' Daily Express 
 
' A moving and jolly book ... with hardly a dull moment and difficult not to be cheered by' Times

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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