Yorkshire author Amanda Vickers held an event to launch her newly-published book The Gorodomlya Island Project at Walton Community Library on a freezing Thursday night.

The book, published by Barnsley-based Pen & Sword, tells the true story of Amanda’s father ‘Cocky’ who was taken on by the RAF in 1946, when he was just 20, to do the technical drawing of rocket parts and equipment at a laboratory that had been used by German scientists to develop the V2 rocket bomb, the one that had devastated London during the second world war.

A few years later he is abducted from an RAF airfield in Northern Germany by the Russians, and taken via the Brocken to Gorodomlya Island, located on Lake Seliger between Moscow and St Petersburg, then called Leningrad. It’s a military island where international scientists are forced to work on a bigger, more accurate rocket for the Russians, but whole families live there. There’s a school at the clubhouse, plays and concerts, boat-trips and tennis.

The story is also a personal one for the author, as she hadn’t seen her 98 year old father for over fifty years by the time lockdown and Zoom reunited them during lockdown. Writing this book together was an exercise in understanding the factors that shaped his personality. Her father died last year in a care home in Canada, but not before he had been so delighted to know that his fascinating story, that he had kept inside himself for decades, was going to be made known.

The Gorodomlya Island Project by Amanda Vickers is available from Pen & Sword’s website, Amazon, and Waterstones.