Last Pilot

Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Author's Club Best First Novel Award 2016, The Last Pilot is a breathtaking debut novel of the space race and of one man's courage in the face of unthinkable loss. 1940s America: Jim Harrison is a test pilot in the United States Air Force, one of the exalted few. He spends his days in a precarious dance with death above the Mojave Desert and his nights at Pancho's bar. He and his wife Grace are desperate for a child and joyous when, against all odds, she conceives. 15 years later and Sputnik has put America in a panic—NASA, newly-formed, is tasked with being first to conquer space. When his young family is thrown into crisis, Harrison is desperate to escape: he seizes a ticket to the moon and trains as an astronaut at Cape Canaveral. But while he is taught to be "afraid to panic" at the controls, he can't apply the same discipline at home, struggling first to hold onto Grace and then to keep a grip on reality itself. Set against the backdrop of one of the most exciting and emotionally charged periods in American history, The Last Pilot is a powerful story of of an everyday hero, tested to the limits, physically and mentally.