The award winning Sidmouth-based documentary maker and bestselling novelist Graham Hurley will give a talk at Sidmouth Library next month about his new WWII thriller The Blood of Others.

The novel, part of Graham’s Spoils of War collection, is set against the disastrous Dieppe campaign in which thousands of Allied troops descended on the German-occupied French coast in August 1942. They came under intense fire from the waiting Germans and fewer than half made it back to Portsmouth and Newhaven. Graham’s book follows the behind-the-scenes machinations of the Allied and German forces as they prepare for the attack.

Before becoming an author Graham had made documentaries on Dunkirk, Dieppe and D Day, and he has described The Blood of Others as ‘the book I’ve always wanted to write’.

He said: “I wanted to explore every corner of my father’s war and the Dieppe Raid was an irresistible temptation.  Previously when on tour in Canada, I met and talked to a handful of Dieppe survivors, guys who’d made it back alive, and many decades later their anger was still palpable. A senior general had assured them that giving Dieppe’s German garrison a taste of steel would, in his phrase, be ‘a piece of cake’. The horror of those landings, and the carnage that followed, stayed with every man and on the 19th August as the years rolled by the said general received hundreds of slices of cake through the post.

“When researching the Dieppe raid and my understanding of events deepened, I began to glimpse ways in which an over-ambitious plan, flawed on several levels, had made it through the countless conversations and top-level conferences that should have never happened. The events of 19th August, 1942, in short, was the textbook example of how the best and most ambitious of intentions can so easily turn into a bloodbath.”

The Blood of Others will be published by Head of Zeus on July 6. Graham’s talk at Sidmouth Library will take place at 3pm on Tuesday, July 11. It is held in association with Winstone’s Books, and will be chaired by local author Andrew Chatterton.

Tickets are priced at £5. To book tickets call the library on 01395 512192 or email: sidmouth.library@librariesunlimited.org.uk.