FaberAcademy | outset

ou've got a good sense of genre, I think: this is historical fiction, and one

commercial potential, you’re writing something that feels eminently readable – the question, probably, will be how much of a pull this particular story is for an agent or publisher.

I’d be surprised if you didn’t write well and there is a cleanliness and clarity to the text that appeals. It reads easily, which belies the hard work undertaken to get to this point. The main thing I would keep an eye on going forwards are the number of familiar phrases that appear in the text (and often the text proper, rather than in the dialogue): so for example, the wrong end of the stick, take them under his wing, alarm bells start to ring, dropped his bombshell, a trail of crumbs, a shot across his bows, and so forth.

Yes, there’s an element in a first draft of getting the words down, but on a rewrite such phrases should be rooted out (and by doing so and replacing with something fresher, will help with issues of voice).

Foreshadowing is something that I think you could make more of in the text – these can be both small and large (the looming war), but a bit more ominousness could work well.

I wish you the best of luck in taking your writing forwards from here.

from its subject matter with a literary bent. In terms of

SYNOPSIS

MOVING

PICTURES

When glamorous American aviator Anne Lindbergh discovers England is not the Eden she imagined, she is forced to confront some ugly truths about her life with Charles…

Flying Over Ruins tells the story of Anne and Charles Lindbergh’s brief yet intense friendship with Harold Nicolson in England in the mid-late 1930s, with Europe already on the brink of war.

For Anne, this friendship is pivotal in her quest to find a new voice and a sense of spiritual freedom; it’s also a catalyst in reigniting Charles’s tragically flawed desire to become an international statesman; yet it’s Harold who faces paying a terrible price for this as he fights to save his political career.

But it’s in Anne’s story that we find the book’s beating heart. Anne Lindbergh was one of the 20th Century’s most intriguing and complex characters

– an adventurer right up there with the likes of Amelia Earhart and Amy Johnson, but even more of a pioneer in the way she reinvented travel writing. She was also destined to become an intelligent and sensitive commentator on the role of women in public life.

At the start of our story, she arrives on these shores still haunted by tragedy – the kidnap and murder of her first son in the so-called Crime of the Century. In England, she finds herself once more; and, helped by both Harold and his partner, Vita Sackville-West, she begins to emerge as a writer of real talent – as she prepares for her most challenging flight yet into the unknown.

A prologue

Dateline: 02:03 GMT, 5 December 1933

Location: 13°27′N 16°34′W

Conditions: Flat calm

A closeness, even this far out from the quayside. A hint of the sea too, of a vast ocean lurking somewhere out there in the night. A breath, no more, barely a sigh. And somewhere back in the tropical blackness, from off the estuary shore, an over-ripeness, a rottenness. Oozing mud, fermenting vegetation.

A looming shape, darkness doubled: a seaplane, docile, inert, the slap and swell of water languid against its pontoons. A stowing of oars, a tying off, clambering, whispers. The pilot, a man very like Charles, but like a lemur too, casting loose the buoy rope then swinging himself up into the cockpit.

The whine of a starter motor. Cold sputters; a cough, flashes of flame from the engine cowling, then a roar, smoothing out into an even tone.

Moving out now, toward open water, Bathurst just a few pinpricks of light in the darkness, fore, starboard, aft, swinging behind, the masses of boats and wharves and silk-cotton trees all blended into one shadow, less than a shadow, no more than a vague notion, receding.

Pilot: “All set?”

Radio key in right hand.

Coil box at feet.

Transmitter door tightly shut.

Antenna reel wound.

Last check of safety belt.

Arcturus, Aldebaran, Alpheratz.

Co-pilot: “All set.”

Engine roar, a lick of power to set them on a heavy turn, one wing tip dipping down then rising again, the airframe coming around, straightening into the breeze, what there is of it.

More power, a greater roar, a lurch, a wallow, a lurch again. Then the kick in the pants, the awful acceleration. A winged boat aspiring to be a bullet, pontoons slicing the water, scalpels across midnight blue silk.

The shaking begins.

Shaking shaking shaking.

Everything a shuddering blur, inside and out, the pinprick lights of Bathurst waterfront, the ghostly green lights of the instrument panel.

Shaking to destruction.

Arcturus, Aldebaran, Alpheratz.

And then.

And then…

And then and then and then

BOOK