Occasionally panoramic, more often intimate, in Clouds of Love and War author Rachel Billington balances a detailed and highly researched picture of the life of a Second World War Spitfire pilot with the travails and ambitions of a young woman too often on her own.The result is both a gripping story of war and a sensitive story of love, a love that struggles to survive.Eddie and Eva meet on the eve of the Second World War.Eddie only wants to be a flyer, to find escape in the clouds from his own complicated family.However, the Battle of Britain makes a pilot's life a dangerous way to flee reality.Eva has her own passionate longing: to become a painter.When Eva's Jewish mother disappears to Germany, she is left alone with her elderly father.Both Eddie and Eva come of age at a time that teaches them that happiness is always fleeting, but there are things worth living – or dying – for.Through the connecting stories of these young people and their wider families, and against a background of southern county airfields, London, Oxford, Dorset and France, Rachel Billington brings the world of war time England, now eighty years in the past, back to life.