Historical and Political Fiction The war ended on paper.
New novelAvailable to preorder · 2026
The Girl in the Pink Dress
Berlin, 1946. In a bombed-out warehouse, a girl in an immaculate pink dress lies untouched by the ruin around her. She is not the first, and it soon becomes clear that someone meant her to be found.
Paperback · Britannia Publishing House Ltd
Now available to preorder
The Girl in the Pink Dress
She was not a victim. She was a message.
Berlin is rubble and paperwork, carved into four sectors where authority changes with the flag on a shoulder. In a gutted warehouse at the city’s edge, Russian soldiers log the body of a girl and move on. No identification. No visible wound. Her dress is clean, her hair arranged, her hands untouched, as though the ruin itself had refused her.
Detective Chief Inspector Saunders, a man trained by intelligence work to let a room speak first, is summoned to the mortuary by a medical officer who cannot explain what he is seeing. There is a faint scent of almonds. And there is a thin folder of other girls, found in other buildings, whose cases were closed before anyone looked properly.
With Detective Constable Jenny Walsh, seconded from London, Saunders follows the paper (transfer orders, redactions, bodies claimed by “external authorities”) into the machinery of the occupation itself. The girls were never meant to disappear. They were meant to be found. And somebody is watching to see who notices.
Berlin. 1946.
“Berlin is no longer a city. It is the exposed skeleton of Europe.”
The city is divided between four occupying powers and papers are checked at every crossing. Nobody can explain the girl in the pink dress.
Two years earlier, the road ran through Normandy.
Available now
Literary Titan Book Award
2025
Pegasus Road
Missing in Action. It was different from killed in action, but it was no comfort.
England, 1944. On a farm where the wheat still stands, Barbara Wilkes lives for the letters of Lieutenant Andrew Calloway, the man who kissed her beneath the willow and promised, on a station platform, that he would come back. Andrew carries her words inside his jacket towards Sword Beach and a bridge over the Caen Canal. Then the letters stop.
The envelope from the War Office offers neither a grave nor a promise. Only silence where Andrew should be. So Barbara leaves in the night with a satchel, a little money hidden in her dress and his last letter folded in her coat. A nurse who worked through the Blitz, she talks her way aboard a hospital ship bound for the wrecked harbour at Cherbourg, and into occupied Normandy, where the only road she knows leads towards Pegasus Bridge.
It is a short, intense novel about how far one person will go for another in wartime.
Kindle edition available on Amazon
- Weymouth
- London
- Folkestone
- Cherbourg
- Caen Canal
- Pegasus Bridge
Private lives inside public catastrophe
A woman crossing occupied France. A detective reading between the lines of an occupation. Harry Black’s fiction lives where history’s great events press down on a single life, and asks what that life will do.
1944
Normandy
Pegasus Road
Barbara crosses the Channel to find the man she loves.
1946
Berlin
The Girl in the Pink Dress
Saunders follows a case that others want closed.
History’s moral fault lines
Where the official account and the human one part company.
Secrets
What is filed, what is redacted, and who decides.
Survival
What people carry through a war, and what it costs to keep carrying it.
Love and loyalty
Promises made on station platforms. Trust given to strangers in the dark.
Political power
Authority that shifts by the street, by the uniform, by the flag on a shoulder.
Consequence
Choices made in extraordinary circumstances, and the lives that follow them.
Forthcoming
- 2026The Girl in the Pink DressPreorder
- 2027Dark WaterSaunders and Walsh return.Coming 2027
- 2028Deep StateComing 2028
Enter the world of Harry Black