Dai Williams grew up in a Welsh fishing village, the son of a traumatised Great War veteran. Colette Billings was raised in a Cheltenham drawing room, taught that people like Dai simply didn't exist in her world.

The summer of 1940 brought them together in ways that old England could never have imagined.

As a Spitfire pilot flying from Biggin Hill, Dai battles the Luftwaffe over the burning Channel. Seventy-six steps below ground at RAF Uxbridge, Colette plots his Squadron's movements on the Operations Room table, tracking every aircraft, calculating every loss. Between sorties and shifts, between combat and crisis, something unexpected takes root.

But the war that brought them together threatens to tear them apart. Class barriers don't vanish in fire — they only burn differently. And in the summer of 1940 survival is a luxury that neither can guarantee.

In the Wake of Fire is a story of two lives colliding across the deepest divides of the old world, forged together in the fire of Britain's darkest hour.