Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published May 2016
192 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
This best-selling debut novel from one of France's most exciting young writers is based on the true story of the 1949 disappearance of Air France's Lockheed Constellation and its famous passengers.
On October 27, 1949, Air France's new plane, the Constellation, launched by the extravagant Howard Hughes, welcomed thirty-eight passengers aboard. On October 28, no longer responding to air traffic controllers, the plane disappeared while trying to land on the island of Santa Maria, in the Azores. No one survived.
The question Adrien Bosc's novel asks is not so much how, but why? What were the series of tiny incidents that, in sequence, propelled the plane toward Redondo Mountain? And who were the passengers? As we recognize Marcel Cerdan, the famous boxer and lover of Edith Piaf, and we remember the musical prodigy Ginette Neveu, whose tattered violin would be found years later, the author ties together their destinies: "Hear the dead, write their small legend, and offer to these thirty-eight men and women, like so many constellations, a life and a story."
"Slender yet ambitious ... the author's metacommentary transforms the narrative into a profound meditation on the far-reaching interconnectedness of tragic events." - Publishers Weekly
"[Bosc's] first novel shines ... The young writer releases the men and women from their unidentified tombs ... to place them on the best of literary biers. Part fiction, part historical investigation, and part tribute, Constellation is radiant." - Le Figaro (France)
"Adrien Bosc, the author of [Constellation] and also the founder of the journals Feuilleton and Desports, dug through archives, investigated through the Internet, unearthed evidence to reproduce the last moments of these prematurely shattered lives." - L'Express (France)
"The writing is clear, brilliant, and streamlined, the construction is wise ... There is in Bosc a bit of Hergé and of Leibniz." - Le Nouvel Observateur (France)
"[Bosc] weaves together the connections between these people and the events of their times, searches to understand why he started out on this process, halfway between literary journalism and fictional adventure, in this unsolvable investigation where at every turn the fictional fights with the real." - Libération (France)
"Shows great promise ... With his Constellation, the fireworks have only just begun." - Livres Hebdo (France)
"[Bosc] has unearthed astonishing biographies ... Bosc, twenty-eight years old, has already demonstrated a curiosity, and his appetite shows here. A coroner who is attentive to the smallest clues, he searches through the debris, revives the dead, notes the hands of fate." - Le Point (France)
"Adrien Bosc meticulously and beautifully pieces together the destiny of the 46 passengers aboard the Constellation with a depth of imagination and heart that renders these long lost lives palpably present. It is the work of a gifted and elegant writer, one who seems to instinctually know how to breathe life into a fictional world." - Dinaw Mengestu, author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
"A novel of realism propelled by Bosc's energy and unique imagination. The mysterious plane crash of Constellation in 1949 is revived within the pages of this magical novel." - Gay Talese, author of The Bridge and A Writer's Life
"Sublime, haunting, exuberant, Constellation turns a tragedy into a miracle. In reviving the victims of a doomed 1949 Air France flight, Adrien Bosc writes beautifully about coincidence and fate, including the greatest coincidence at all - that we are alive on earth together for a short time. Constellation is a novel of profound humanity." - Nathaniel Rich, author of Odds Against Tomorrow
This information about Constellation was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Adrien Bosc was born in 1986 in Avignon. Constellation, the winner of the prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l'academie francaise and a best seller in France, is his first novel.
Willard Wood is the translator of Yannick Grannec's The Goddess of Small Victories, Jacqueline Raoul-Duval's Kafka in Love, and Anne Plantagenet's The Last Rendezvous, among other works. He is a winner of the Lewis Galantière Award for Literary Translation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation. He lives in Connecticut.
The Flower Sisters
by Michelle Collins Anderson
From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.
The House on Biscayne Bay
by Chanel Cleeton
As death stalks a gothic mansion in Miami, the lives of two women intertwine as the past and present collide.
The Funeral Cryer by Wenyan Lu
Debut novelist Wenyan Lu brings us this witty yet profound story about one woman's midlife reawakening in contemporary rural China.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
