Leslie Thomas: 46 books

From Barnardo boy to original virgin soldier; from apprentice journalist in London's Fleet Street to famous novelist... At times funny, at times sad, but always honest and utterly compulsive, Leslie Thomas's story is straight out of fiction. As an orphan, he picked his way through the rubble...

Written with the characteristic wit and good humour, Leslie Thomas's novel tells the story of a grown man who runs away from home, and the adventures that befall him in his quest for a new lease of life. His latest love affair discovered (thanks to an observant fifteen-year-old daughter who points...

Leslie Thomas's odyssey is a vivid, personal account of the most fascinating islands at the furthest reaches of the globe: to islands as distant and diverse as Saint-Pierre et Miquelon off Newfoundland and Great Barrier Island off New Zealand, and to places more familiar by name, including Nantucket,...

Fresh from Los Angeles, Mrs Pearl Collingwood and her daughter Rona arrive in the frenzied no-man's-land of Heathrow airport: from the nearby village of Bedmansworth, Edward Richardson jets in and out of it faster than his marriage can tolerate. Yet precisely where village and airport overlap, there...

As plain-clothes men go, Dangerous Davies looks like a non-starter. The small fry of petty larceny and minor disturbances in the backwaters of north-west London are his daily round. His philosophising Welsh drinking companion Mod, his outsized and unruly dog Kitty, his quarrels with his landlady Mrs...

At four-thirty one January afternoon a bus returning to Miami and Fort Lauderdale containing tourists who have been visiting a Seminole Indian Reservation is held up at gunpoint by five hooded gangsters. The combined ages of the 5 robbers total 320 years. Leslie Thomas's latest novel is the...

Summer 1940. The evacuation of Dunkirk proves that the British can rise to a challenge, even against seemingly insurmountable odds. But now the soldiers walk the streets of Dover, even wandering through Woolworths store, and take weary turns on the town's skating rink. Life, despite the threat...

Frank Inigo Savage simply wants to be alone and the top flat of Kensington Heights seems just the place. Until the other bizarre and eccentric inhabitants of the building start arriving on his doorstep. And the Savage gets a visit from a homeless waif he meets in the local launderette called...

Dangerous Davies earned his nickname the same way that fat men nicknamed Tiny earn theirs. He is known as the last detective not because there are no others like him, but because he is, in nearly every instance, the last boy picked for the team. With little actual work to occupy him, Dange has plenty...

In the spring of 1940, the spectre of war turned into grim reality. And on the English home front, men, women and children found themselves swept into a maelstrom of fear and uncertainty while events abroad led inexorably from the debacles of Norway and Dunkirk to the horror and glory of the...

The worst has happened. On the eve of their return to Blighty, Brigg and his fellow National Servicemen find themselves sentenced to another six months in Panglin Barracks... Many of the surviving characters from The Virgin Soldiers live again in these pages: dogged Tasker, the odious Sergeant...

Bursting with life and bawdy humour, National Serviceman Brigg is now a Regular Army sergeant defending the Empire in the beds and bars of Hong Kong. Peace-time diversions include sensual fireworks with a pair of delicious Chinese twins and a tender, erotic affair with the lonely wife of an American serviceman.

TROPIC OF RUISLIP is a sage for life on a modern executive housing estate, seething with the fears, snobbereis, frustrations and lusts of well-heeled young couples trundling uneasily towards middle age.

In a sunlit, secret valley in the green mountains of central Italy, two people meet away from the horrors and clamour of battle. David Hopkins, a young fisherman from west Wales and Kate Medhurst, from a genteel town in the Thames Valley, embark upon an idyllic love affair away from the conflict that...