Today, I'm chatting with C.M. Gray about his powerful new novel, One More Hour of Daylight. Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, this deeply moving historical fiction explores courage, sacrifice, and the lasting impact of a single promise. Join us as C.M. Gray discusses the inspiration behind the novel, the extensive research that brought Derrick Sedgley's story to life, and why this was the story he had been waiting years to tell.
But first, let's check out One More Hour Of Daylight
One More Hour of Daylight marks a departure from your previous fantasy and historical fantasy novels. What inspired you to write a work of pure historical fiction set during the Second World War?
This is a story I have wanted to tell for several years. I have greatly enjoyed writing the Pendragon series, and there is still more to come from that world: the third book, about Arthur, will be published later this year, though I promise it will not be the Arthur story you have read before. But One More Hour of Daylight has been itching to be written for a long time, and it is, in many ways, a deeply personal book.
Many of the people who inhabit it are drawn from people in my own life, and the locations are places I know intimately. Riversdale Road in Romford, where my grandfather lived, is there. His name was Cliff Sedgley. I grew up close to where Warley Barracks had stood during the war, though by my time they were little more than ruins in the woods: we would find old military buttons and bullet casings scattered in the leaves. And I lived for several years in the village of Clomot in Burgundy, France. The book grew from all of that, quietly and persistently, until I finally sat down and wrote it.
The novel begins with a seemingly simple promise made in an Essex field in 1939, yet its consequences echo across the entire story. What drew you to the idea of exploring how a single decision can shape a person's life?
I wanted the story to have real depth, not simply a boy who lies about his age, enlists, and goes off to have an adventure. That felt too flat, too thin. Life is about emotion: about the decisions we make freely, and those we are forced into by circumstances beyond our control. Both kinds carry consequences, and it is those consequences that the novel tries to explore.
What I found most compelling was the idea of mirrored decisions: Derrick makes a choice in a barn in an Essex field when he goes to help a downed German pilot, and years later Ernst Braun finds himself in a situation that echoes it almost exactly. Both men are forced to decide how to respond to where they find themselves. We all face those moments, every day, in ways large and small: left or right, help or betray, speak or stay silent. I wanted to follow what happens when those choices collide across time.
Derrick Sedgley is forced to confront the consequences of choices made in his youth while operating in the dangerous world of occupied Europe. What interested you most about his character and journey?
Derrick enlists at seventeen, telling them he is nineteen. He has grown up speaking several languages, which brings him to the attention of the SOE, and suddenly he is being trained to operate in occupied Europe, helping the resistance and surviving in conditions most of us cannot imagine. That actually happened: there were hundreds of young men and women who went through SOE training, blew up bridges and military installations, and helped downed airmen escape back to Britain whilst staying one step ahead of the Gestapo and SS.
I was drawn to what that experience would have done to a person of his age and temperament: serious, solitary, morally serious in a way that becomes both his greatest strength and his greatest burden. I also made a deliberate decision to route his journey through places I know well: Warley, Clomot, Lyon, Zurich. That familiarity helped me bring those settings to life, and there was something quietly pleasurable about walking the streets of those places in my imagination while the war raged all around him.
The world of the SOE was built on secrecy, courage, and constant danger. What research did you undertake to bring this aspect of the war authentically to life?
Like most writers, I began as a reader. I have devoured books since childhood and have always preferred a book to a film. For One More Hour of Daylight I read widely about wartime Britain: rationing, the blackout, the process of joining up for military service, and the specific world of the SOE. 64 Baker Street really was a central address for SOE operations. Many recruits were sent for training to Arisaig House in Scotland, as Derrick is, and I was fortunate enough to speak to someone who had actually been through that training, which gave me an insight I could not have found in any book.
Another location that features significantly is Beaulieu House in the New Forest, though that will come into its own more fully in the sequel I am working on now. The short answer is: I research extensively, and I enjoy every moment of it.
The title, One More Hour of Daylight, is both evocative and poignant. Without revealing too much, what significance does it hold within the story?
It is what Ernst Braun says in the earliest part of the story. He has had a devastating day: his Messerschmitt 109 has been shot down over Essex, his arm is badly broken, and he believes he is about to be captured, tortured, perhaps killed. When a young man appears, all Ernst wants is rest: a moment's respite from the trauma of that day. So he asks for one more hour of daylight before whatever comes next.
That request, and the promise made in response to it, echoes through the entire novel. It is the novel's heartbeat. By the time you reach the final pages, I hope that the phrase carries a weight it could not possibly have had when you first encountered it.
Your previous novels often included elements of myth, magic, and the supernatural. Did writing a story rooted entirely in historical reality present any new challenges or opportunities as a storyteller?
It was an entirely different writing experience. My style has changed considerably through the writing of this book: I had to be more structured, more disciplined, more attentive to keeping the plot moving without ever letting it stall. I have often described my writing process as being like reading a good book, watching a good film, and playing a computer game all at the same time: I become absorbed, watching from a slight distance as the story seems to find its own shape. With One More Hour of Daylight, I had to keep a much firmer hand on that process. Historical fiction demands fidelity to the world it inhabits. You cannot invent your way out of a corner the way you sometimes can in fantasy. It was more demanding, but also, in its own way, deeply satisfying.
The novel explores themes of guilt, loyalty, love, and redemption. Which of these themes resonated most strongly with you while writing Derrick's story?
All of them, if I am honest, because they are not really separate themes: they are emotions, the feelings and impulses that make us human. How one person responds to a given situation may leave them carrying guilt for years, while another person making an almost identical choice might experience it as loyalty. Derrick falls in love, and I will not spoil how that unfolds, but there is one moment when he comes very close to making a completely different decision. The moment passes, and he remains faithful to what he feels. It could have gone either way. That is life, and in this particular story, the difference between one choice and its opposite is sometimes the difference between life and death.
Having spent years writing fantasy before turning to historical fiction, what do you hope readers, both new and existing fans, will take away from One More Hour of Daylight?
First and most simply, I hope they enjoy it just as a story, a book by the pool or in their favourite armchair. But I also hope in the end that they care deeply about what happens to Derrick, to Lotte, to Tommy, because I have spent so long in their company that they feel entirely real to me. Real enough that all three of them feature heavily in the sequel I am writing now, in which Lotte and Tommy in particular come into their own in ways readers of this novel may not expect.
I also hope that readers who have not yet discovered my other books will give them a chance. My first novel, The Flight of the Griffin, was longlisted in the Times/Chicken House Children's Writing Competition back in 2012. I was approached by an agent, and for a brief and giddy moment I thought I was about to become the next J.K. Rowling. It did not quite work out that way: the market for fantasy was considered too crowded, and so I wrote something different. That became Shadowland, about Uther Pendragon, which quickly gathered more than nine hundred five-star reviews on Amazon and became the first book of the Pendragon Saga. I have recently reclaimed all my earlier books from my previous publisher, spent the winter re-editing them, and will shortly be republishing them as considerably better versions of themselves.
The novel is full of characters drawn from real life, or from places you know personally. Did that closeness ever make the writing emotionally difficult?
Yes, more than I expected. Writing Cliff Sedgley, for instance, was strange in ways I did not anticipate. My grandfather was a quiet man, as Clifford is in the novel, and there were moments when putting words around that silence felt both natural and uncomfortable, as though I was handling something that belonged to someone else. The same was true of the locations: writing Romford, writing Clomot, writing the roads and fields I have actually walked, gave those scenes a texture I could not have invented, but it also meant that some of them carried a personal weight the reader will never fully see. I think that is as it should be. Not every layer of a novel needs to be visible. Some of it is just there, holding the rest up.
Ernst Braun is a German pilot and technically an enemy, yet he is clearly not the villain of the novel. How did you approach writing a character who exists on what might be called the wrong side of history?
With a great deal of care and, I hope, honesty. Ernst is not a Nazi. He is a young man who loves aircraft, has read Goethe and Thomas Mann, and was conscripted into a war he did not choose. He crashes in an English field, frightened and in pain, and asks for something entirely human. To write him as simply an enemy would have been both lazy and dishonest. The Second World War was fought between nations and ideologies, but it was lived by individuals, millions of them, most of whom had not chosen the circumstances they found themselves in. Ernst is one of those individuals. Understanding that does not diminish what the war was or what was at stake. It simply insists on his humanity, which is the one thing the novel is not prepared to take from him, even at the end.
The novel has a sequel in progress. Without giving too much away, can you tell us anything about where the story goes next?
I can tell you that it picks up not long after the first book ends, and that the world Derrick and Lotte step into in England is not the safe harbour either of them imagined. The war is not over. The SOE still has uses for people with Derrick's particular skills, and now also Lotte, it turns out, has skills of her own that nobody had thought to ask about. Tommy Briggs becomes a much larger presence in the sequel, and Beaulieu House in the New Forest, which I mentioned briefly in relation to my research, plays a significant role. I am enjoying writing it enormously. These characters have not finished with me yet, and I do not think I have finished with them either.
You have written across several genres now: YA fantasy, historical fantasy, and historical fiction. Do you think of yourself as a particular kind of writer, or does the story simply lead you where it needs to go?
The story leads, always. I am not sure I have ever sat down and decided to write in a particular genre so much as decided to follow a particular story, and the genre has announced itself along the way. The Flight of the Griffin wanted to be a YA fantasy, but only because I don´t write heavy violence, sex or profanity; actually, most of my readers have been adults. Shadowland wanted to be historical but ended up as historical fantasy, because Merlyn was in it and there was simply no way around that. One More Hour of Daylight wanted to be told plainly, without magic, without myth, because its subject demanded it. I follow the story. I trust that instinct. It has not let me down yet.
A huge thank you to C.M. Gray for taking the time to chat with me today and for sharing the story behind One More Hour of Daylight. It has been fascinating to learn more about the history, the characters, and the personal experiences that helped shape this remarkable novel. I hope you've enjoyed the interview as much as I have, and I wish C.M. Gray every success with the book and its eagerly anticipated sequel.
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See you on your next coffee break!
Take Care,
Mary Anne xxx