Elizabeth McKenzie is a schoolteacher trapped in a job she hates, alongside colleagues she hates, in a time she hates: 1976. But one of those traps is unexpectedly sprung, and she finds herself back in 1945. She is still in the same northern town but, in the closing months of the Second World War, it is part of a different world. She meets a handsome and heroic soldier, William Porter, returned from fighting the Japanese in Malaya. William carries the physical and mental scars of a bad war.

As their relationship flourishes, life starts to get even more complicated as Elizabeth finds herself witnessing the first meeting between the couple who will become her parents. But that is nothing to the drama that unfolds when she and William are abruptly transported back to 1976. As William struggles to cope with an England in which all the values he fought for appear to have been abandoned, he soon has the police on his trail, after he exercises his deadly jungle warfare skills on a gang of muggers. Yet the detective on his trail is strangely sympathetic to the use of guerilla tactics on the street…

Timeless Hearts is a highly original novel that juxtaposes the eternal truths of love with the shifting sands of time.

David J Middleton was born in Sheffield in 1958. He grew up in the working-class streets of Hillsborough on the north side of the city.

A career in engineering began in 1974 and he met his future wife, Jane, in the summer of 1976. They were married in 1981 and have two children.