One
beautiful spring evening, Kitty Danby meets Sammy Ray Bailey, a handsome
young American pilot stationed nearby. Sixteen-year-old Kitty and Sammy
quickly fall in love and, for a few precious weeks, the future holds
a promise of happiness for which Kitty hardly dares hope.
But it is 1944 and a tragic incident changes everything, leading to a web of secrets and misunderstandings which will only be unravelled years later...
My parents married in 1940 and when I started writing the story that became Out of the Blue I set out to write about my mother’s wartime experience.
Having stayed through the Blitz she left London in 1944 at my father’s insistence when the first V-1 flying bombs were launched across the channel bound for London. She was twenty-three and her baby son was a year old and, along with her mother and her younger brothers, she exchanged living comfortably in South London for a remote cottage in Worcestershire – no electricity, no running water and bats in the upstairs bedrooms.
I'd planned to write fiction – it was never going to be a family biography – but quite quickly a different story began to develop from the one I thought I would write. Two of my characters, Kitty Danby and Sammy Ray Bailey, took on a life of their own and it was their story that I had to tell.
Read 
'Out of the Blue is a poignant, gripping read. Val Rutt portrays beautifully how passion, pain and betrayal are evoked by an unexpected letter.' Jamila Gavin - author of 'Coram Boy'.
Read interview with Val about Out of the Blue HERE.
Adèle Geras reviews Out of the Blue on her website HERE.