One More Hour of Daylight by C.M. Gray

 

One More Hour of Daylight 
By C.M. Gray

Publication Date: 16th May 2026

Publisher: Constance Books

Print Length: 417

Genre: WWII Thriller

Some debts survive captivity. Some brothers never stop looking.

France, 1943. SOE operative Derrick Sedgley is running for the Spanish border with Lotte Braun: a German woman, an unlikely ally, and a complication he never saw coming.

Behind them, closing fast, is her brother.

Ernst Braun is a Luftwaffe pilot who woke up in a British hospital bed and spent two years deciding who put him there. All he had asked for was one more hour of daylight. Now he wants his sister back. He wants Derrick dead. The SS officer travelling with him has a simpler agenda: he wants them all dead.

The Pyrenees are ahead. The border is possible. Not everyone will reach it.

One More Hour of Daylight is a taut, morally complex WWII thriller about promises made in good faith, debts that survive captivity, and what it costs to bring someone safely home.

One more hour of daylight. That was all he asked for.

It was never going to be enough.

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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 will be fully 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.

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