Clouds above, the - Hardcover

In a novel that will remind many readers of "The English Patient" and "Birdsong," a prize-winning British poet and writer has crafted a remarkable elegy to love, the summer of 1940, and the Battle of Britain. "The Clouds Above" is not only a wonderfully written love story set during the Battle of Britain, but also a brilliant and evocative description of the battle itself. Andrew Greig recreates with a sure touch that extraordinary summer when Great Britain's survival lay in the hands of two thousand or so very young men. The aerial combat scenes are so vivid that to read this book is to be with these men up in the blue sky, where ten seconds is a very long time and everything happens in a rush of adrenaline and terror. Len, a Royal Air Force Sergeant pilot, and Tadeusz, a Polish pilot serving in the RAF, are thrown directly into the fierce struggle with the Luftwaffe. Despite their obvious differences, they become close friends, each aware that neither of them is likely to survive. In this tumultuous and uncertain time Len falls in love with Stella, a young WAAF radar operator. She is trying to endure her own war: making the transition from a sedate middle-class English life to service life with other young women, being bombed and seeing her fellow WAAFs killed, listening to young men die every day, and trying to find an intense, if brief, happiness with a young man who risks his life daily. In chapters alternately narrated by the two young lovers, Len and Stella wrestle with the foolhardiness of a romance in wartime, even as the battle in the sky intensifies. Drawing from his mother's diary chronicling her own experience during the Battle of Britain, AndrewGreig has written a novel that is as compelling a love story as it is a war story, and of which the "Sunday Times" (London) said: "Memorable, not only has a good sense of period, but a profound sense of time, and of interpenetration of past and present....Beautifully done."