In the 1930s, flying was all the rage. All over Britain women and men had grown up watching wartime flying aces perform aerobatics in the sky. Now they too were learning how to fly. Robert Owen is the only son from a Welsh vicarage, now a brilliant pilot and flying instructor, recently of the Royal Air Force. He has taken a new job at the flying school at Best, a prosperous cathedral town in England. Flying has never seemed so alluring and so terrifying. Human frailty is tested in the drilling and repetition of hours in flight, and Robert's skills as a pilot and in diplomacy with pupils with delusions about their competence are tested to their limits. And then he falls in love, risking his heart as well as his body in the air.

About the Author
John Llewelyn Rhys (1911-1940) was born in Abergavenny and died in an RAF training accident just before the Battle of Britain in 1940. He published The Flying Shadow in 1936, and The World Owes Me A Living in 1939 and England is My Village in 1941 (the latter two also reissued in one volume by Handheld Press). England is My Village won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize in 1942. In the same year the novelist Jane Oliver set up the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in her late husband's memory: 'something to give young writers the extra chance he didn't get'.


Book Information
ISBN 9781912766642
Author John Llewelyn Rhys
Format Paperback
Page Count 195
Imprint Handheld Press
Publisher Handheld Press