The last year of the Great War, fought in open cockpits and told in letters home.

Salisbury, 1917. Tom Munro has an engineering degree, a mother who wants him safe, and no intention of listening to her. He wants to fly. Within months he is learning on Avro 504s. By spring 1918 he is in France with a Bristol Fighter squadron, and a loud, fearless New Yorker called Bill Franklin is manning the guns behind him.

The German spring offensive is breaking over the lines. Tom flies low-level raids on Douai and Cambrai, fights Fokker Triplanes in the cloud, and blacks out pulling out of dives. He watches friends go down in flames. When he and Bill are shot down into no-man's-land, what happens in the shell crater stays with him for the rest of his life. By the Armistice he has a medal for landing behind enemy lines to rescue a downed pilot. He also has a drinking habit and nerves he admits to only one person.

That person is Louisa Foster. She is the industrialist's daughter who snubbed him over afternoon tea, then handed him her address as she left. Now she is a volunteer nurse at the St John Ambulance hospital at Étaples. She washes lice-ridden men, sits with the dying, and keeps working the night the German bombers come for the hospital.

The author presents their letters as they might have read if no censor had cut them.

For readers of Derek Robinson and Buzz Bernard

Book 1 of the Tom Munro series, by a former RAF flying instructor. Each book can be read as a standalone.