Constellation

Serpent's Tail / Profile Books Ltd, London, 2016. Good secondhand condition.

On 27 October 1949, Air France's Lockheed Constellation F-BAZN left Paris's Orly airport for New York. Hours later, it disappeared on approach to its scheduled stopover in the Azores. It was found on a mountainside five miles from its intended landing zone. There were no survivors.

Constellation tells the true stories of the forty-eight passengers who died, their place in the world and their hopes and dreams for the life awaiting them on the other side of the Atlantic; of the lover of Edith Piaf, the heavyweight boxer Marcel Cedran flying to New York for a world title fight; of 30-year-old virtuoso violinist Ginette Neveu; of Kay Kamen, Walt Disney's merchandising tsar; of five Basque shepherds emigrating to America; and of the whole constellation of untold stories that tragedy scatters around it like so much debris.

Bosc's magnetic, beautiful, moving novel is a memorial to an air disaster that happened half a century ago. But it's also a profound exploration of the nature of collective tragedy.