A gripping wartime novel of a love that struggles to survive. 

Through scenes that are occasionally panoramic and often intimate, Rachel Billington in Clouds of Love and War balances a detailed and highly researched picture of the life of a World War II Spitfire pilot with the travails and ambitions of a young woman too often on her own. 

Eddie and Eva meet on the eve of the Second World War. Eddie only wants to be a flyer, to find escape in the clouds from his own complicated family. But the Battle of Britain makes a pilot’s life a dangerous way to flee reality. Eva has her own passionate longing: to become a painter. When Eva’s Jewish mother disappears to Germany, she is left alone with her elderly father. Both Eddie and Eva come of age at a time that teaches them that happiness is always fleeting, but there are things worth living—or dying—for.

Through the connecting stories of two young people and their wider families, and against a background of southern county airfields, Billington brings the world of wartime England, now eighty years in the past, back to life.