One More Hour of Daylight
by C.M. Gray
From the Bestselling Author of Shadowland
On the first day of World War II, a young man makes a promise—one that will shape every choice he makes for the next four years.
Essex. September 1939.
A wounded German pilot drops from a clear autumn sky into a quiet English field. Seventeen-year-old Derrick finds him—broken and feverish. Not an enemy. Just a young man asking for one small mercy before everything ends.
One more hour of daylight. That is all I ask. A chance to breathe free air before whatever comes next.
Derrick gives him until morning.
When the stretcher comes, the pilot’s last words strike Derrick like a blow he will never stop feeling.
Scotland. France. Germany. 1941–1943.
In the mountains of Scotland, they teach him how to kill, how to lie, and how to endure things that break most men. Then they give him a new name, put him on a plane, and drop him into the dark.
As an SOE operative deep inside occupied Europe, Derrick Sedgley lives on false papers, borrowed names, and nerves worn to nothing by years in the shadows. He moves agents to safety, builds escape routes, and stays one breath ahead of the Gestapo.
Then a mission collapses—and everything changes.
Forced to run, Derrick finds himself moving through the most dangerous corners of occupied Europe alongside someone whose connection to his past he cannot yet see. As safe houses fall, loyalties fracture, and the frozen passes of the Pyrenees rise ahead like the edge of the world, Derrick begins to understand something.
The choice he made in an Essex field on the first day of the war has been leading him here all along.
Some debts cannot be paid.
Some can only be carried.
And some—if you are brave enough, and fortunate enough—can finally be laid to rest.
From the quiet fields of Essex to the mountains of Scotland, from the dangerous streets of Lyon to the shadows of wartime Hamburg and the high passes of the Pyrenees, One More Hour of Daylight is an unforgettable story of courage, guilt and redemption—of ordinary people forced to make impossible choices in extraordinary times.
Some promises can survive a war.
Some people can too.
For readers who believe that even in war, what matters most is who we choose to be.
Praise for One More Hour of Daylight:
"A beautifully written book with a perfect pace that kept me reading
from start to finish."
~ Bookcollector, Amazon 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
"A confident, carefully crafted novel that handles its subject matter with restraint, earning the weight it carries."
~ Indie Library, Goodreads 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
The People Behind the People:
Characters in One More Hour of Daylight
The characters that inhabit the pages of One More Hour of Daylight sprang, of course, from my imagination. But then again, most of them, like the places where the story unfolds, are in some way rooted in people I have known and places I have spent real time. What else can a writer honestly draw upon?
I grew up listening to my mother talk about her childhood on Riversdale Road in Romford: watching her father, my grandfather Cliff, assembling their Anderson shelter in the back garden, and then being led out half-asleep in the middle of the night to crouch inside it, listening to the bombers droning overhead in the darkness, the searchlights of London visible on the horizon, waiting for the all-clear to sound. Those are not invented details. They are memories that were handed to me across a kitchen table, and they find their way into the opening of One More Hour of Daylight almost exactly as they were told to me.
My grandfather's name was Cliff Sedgley. My father's name was Derrick. Both names, as readers of the novel will have noticed, are borrowed directly, the first for the father, the second for the son. My mother grew up, met my father, and moved to Brentwood, where I was born, and it is from that particular corner of Essex that the whole story grows.
In Warley, just outside Brentwood, my brother and I used to play in the woods with our friends. We called the place The Barracks, without quite knowing why; it was simply woods and a scattering of derelict buildings, old brick and broken concrete half-swallowed by undergrowth. We found buttons, spent cartridge casings, fragments of things we could not identify. It was only years later that I understood what we had been playing in: the ruins of Warley Barracks, the Victorian home of the Essex Regiment, the very training ground where Derrick Sedgley learns to be a soldier. I still find that remarkable. The place was in my childhood long before I knew what it was, waiting to become part of a story.
I have been fortunate enough to live and travel widely: India, Hong Kong, the Middle East. But in the 1990s I bought and restored an old farmhouse in Clomot, a small village in Burgundy, France. It is a beautiful part of the world, and one with a layered and complicated history, especially during the Second World War, when Burgundy was a principal area of operations for the French Resistance and for SOE agents inserted from Britain. It was, therefore, the natural place to send Derrick when he crosses into occupied France. I know those roads, those hills, those villages. I know the quality of the light in the early morning and the way the vineyards look in October. That knowledge is in every scene set there, even when it is invisible.
During the restoration of the farmhouse, we cleared out an old well, descending on a ladder to dig out the accumulated mud at the bottom, and among the debris we found several machine gun clips, corroded and silent after decades underground. I have never been able to stop wondering how they came to be there. What was their story? Had someone returned from a night operation and needed to dispose of the evidence quickly, before a patrol came? In my imagination, at least, it was Derrick and Jean-Luc Defaux who threw them down. Fiction, perhaps. But not entirely impossible.
The other landscape that shapes the later part of the novel is the Pyrenees. I have lived near Barcelona for a number of years, and on a clear morning I can see the mountains from my terrace as I drink my coffee. They are beautiful and they are brutal, and during the war they were a lifeline. The French Resistance and the SOE used routes across those mountains to move hundreds of people to safety: downed Allied airmen, Jewish families, political dissidents, escaped prisoners of war. The crossings were physically punishing and not always successful. Derrick and Lotte use one of those routes in the final section of the novel, pursued, as many real people were, by those who very much did not want them to reach the other side. I have walked parts of those mountains myself. I know what the air feels like up there, and what it means to look south and see Spain laid out below you.
So yes: the characters are fictional. There was no Derrick Sedgley, as far as I know. Ernst and Lotte Braun are names chosen from thin air. Poor Hilde, Tommy Briggs, Henri Marchand, Major Fenn, all of them are invented. And yet the inspiration behind every one of them has been entirely real: real places, real family memories, real history, and real people encountered along the way, their qualities borrowed and reshaped into something new.
I know these characters now as I know old friends. I know how Derrick moves through a room and what silences cost him. I know what Tommy sounds like when he is trying not to show that he is frightened. I know the particular stillness that Lotte carries, and what it conceals. That is the strange alchemy of writing fiction: you begin with fragments of the real world, people and places and half-remembered stories, and somewhere in the process they become entirely themselves, independent of their origins, alive on the page in a way that no longer belongs to you.
If this post has made you curious about any of them, I would be very glad indeed if you were to go and meet them properly.
This novel is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.
C.M. Gray
C.M. Gray's first book, The Flight of the Griffin, was longlisted in the 2015 Times Chicken House Writing Competition. Shadowland, the first book in the Pendragon Saga, has so far received over 900 five-star reviews on Amazon. These things still genuinely astonish him, and he is deeply grateful for every one of them.
Most of his previous work has been fantasy: either pure fantasy or historical fantasy, the kind of writing where druids turn up uninvited and one of your main characters develops an unsettling affinity with wolves before you have quite decided what sort of book you are writing. Shadowland began with every intention of staying grounded in historical reality, the story of Uther Pendragon. It did not. It has turned out to be a popular book, so he does not complain.
His years travelling through Asia, India, Africa and the Middle East have a habit of finding their way onto the page. He has seen and done some fairly strange things along the way and met some extraordinary people, and writing fantasy has always felt, to him, only a short step from writing fact.
New for 2026
One More Hour of Daylight, marks C.M. Gray's return to writing. It was published in June 2026, marking a departure: pure historical fiction, no druids, no wolves. It follows Derrick Sedgley, a seventeen-year-old from Essex who makes a single moral choice in a field one September morning in 1939 and spends the next four years living with the consequences. From the Essex countryside to occupied France, from the mountains of Burgundy to the Pyrenees, it is a story about promises, betrayal, courage and the cost of doing the right thing too late.
And for those who have been waiting patiently for the Pendragon Saga to continue: the third book, Shadow's Heir, the story of Arthur Pendragon, follows in September 2026. More on that very soon.
C.M. Gray was born in England and grew up in the Essex countryside near the Suffolk border, which is where Derrick Sedgley grows up, too. The flat fields, the big skies and the particular quality of Essex light found their way into the book, whether he intended them to or not.
C.M. Gray is now very happily settled just outside Barcelona with his wonderful wife and partner in life, Adriana.
Connect with C.M.:
Amazon Author Page • Goodreads
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