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by Roger Pepper

In 1939, in the growing shadows of World War II, young Tommy Parker, his mother, and his sister leave their London house for the Midlands to avoid the German bombing. As evacuees, they endure a challenging time living with distant relatives until they find a new home south of London. Tommy’s ambitious father, a Lieutenant in the British Army, joins the fighting in far-off lands—from the sun-scorched deserts of Egypt to the ravaged streets of Italy and Germany. Tommy’s world begins to fall apart when letters from his father grow scarce, and the blast from a German V1 bomb shatters the front of the family’s house. Torn by the harsh realities of War and parental conflict, Tommy fights back.

381 pages, ebook

First published December 1, 2025

About the author

Mainstream author Roger Pepper left a successful career in science to pursue his lifelong ambition to become a novelist. An Associate of the British Institution of Metallurgists, Roger attended postgraduate studies at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, where he earned a Ph.D.
Roger is the coauthor of a patent on the development of the metal composite material used for the antenna of the Hubble Space Telescope. He began writing in his spare time while serving as the Director of Research of an Aerospace Materials Company in the United States.
His memoir, My Father the Viking, won 3rd Prize in the 2006 Linda Joy Myers Memoir Competition of the National League of American Pen Women, an open competition for published and unpublished works. He received an Honorable Mention for an earlier version of the first 50 pages of The Brothers Cro-Magnon from a contest run by the Speculative Literature Foundation.
He is the author of four novels: No Man’s Sons, Tommy’s War, Ice, and Davide.
Roger is a member of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. He is a co-organizer of the Portland Writers Group (480 members) and spent several years as the host of some of their monthly writing workshops. Tess Gerritsen acknowledged him in her bestselling medical thriller, Harvest, for providing research materials.
With friends from the Appalachian Mountain Club, Roger hiked in the Austrian and Italian Alps, traveled in France and Israel, and trekked in the Kangchenjunga and Annapurna Himalayan regions of Nepal, the Tien Shan [mountains/Mountains] of the Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. He writes full-time and lives in Maine.