Born in Newport, Monmouthshire, 1931, Leslie Thomas is the son of a sailor who was lost at sea in 1943. His boyhood in an orphanage is evoked in This Time Next Week, published in 1964. At sixteen, he became a reporter, before going on to do his national service. He won worldwide acclaim with his bestselling novel The Virgin Soldiers, which has achieved international sales of over four million copies. Waiting for the Day, his twenty-eighth novel published to great acclaim in hardback in November 2003, will be published in paperback in time for the sixtieth anniversary of the D-Day landings in June 2004.