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  • Published: 15 March 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099474166
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

World's End




A warm-hearted and moving memoir in the tradition of The Road to Nab End:

World's End is the story of Donald Wheal¹s childhood in Chelsea's World's End at the height of the Second World War.

Not for him the privileged bohemian world of Chelsea a few hundred yards away. Descended from rural immigrants, ladies of the night and bare-knuckle fighters, Donald Wheal¹s upbringing took place amidst grimy factories and generating plants, illegal street bookmakers, dog tracks, tenements and street walkers who plied their trade in Piccadilly and Soho.

World's End is the story of how he and his family struggled free from this underclass. It is also an individual history of the Second World War, of a small boy¹s grappling with the bitter separation of evacuation, the return to an already battered London, the wonderland of bomb-damaged houses to play in, and the nights of terror as the Blitz returned.

  • Published: 15 March 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099474166
  • Imprint: Arrow
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $29.99
Categories:

About the author

Donald James

Donald James is the author of the bestselling novels Monstrum, The Fortune Teller and The Fall of the Russian Empire and also the Penguin Dictionary of the Third Reich.

Also by Donald James

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Praise for World's End

'An overwhelmingly honest account of one boy's wartime memories'

The Good Books Guide

'Written to almost make you wish you had been there'

The Times

'Terrific, an insightful memoir about family love'

Evening Standard

'I loved it. Wheal spins a fine, affecting tale. It begins in a world where, on Fridays, factory girls wore curlers in their hair, and the now gentrified streets were once known for the brutality of their Saturday night fights. It ends with the horrors and destruction of war.' Gilda O'Neill, author of My East End and Our Street