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The D-day landings—the fate of 2.5 million men, three thousand landing craft and the entire future of Europe depend on the right weather conditions on the English Channel on a single day. A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing on an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead? And what is the relationship between predictability and turbulence, one of the last great mysteries of modern physics?
Wallace Ryman has devised a system that comprehends all of this—but he is a reclusive pacifist who stubbornly refuses to divulge his secrets. Henry Meadows, a young math prodigy from the Met Office, is sent to Scotland to uncover Ryman’s system and apply it to the Normandy landings. But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone could have imagined. When Henry meets Gill, Ryman’s beautiful wife, events, like the weather, begin to spiral out of control.
From Giles Foden, prizewinning author of The Last King of Scotland, a gripping blend of fact and fiction in a novel about how human beings deal with uncertainty.
"Starred Review...it is the meticulous fusion of science and military history that dazzles, coming off like an exhilarating fusion of Richard Powers and John le Carré." - Publishers Weekly
"This work is lively, engaging, and readable, though readers unfamiliar with the principles of physics may find the detailed, scientific language distracting to the pace of the novel." - Library Journal
"Well-crafted scientific and philosophical speculation dominates a less consistent plotline, making for thought-provoking if only patchily gripping reading." - Kirkus Reviews
"Starred Review. Challenging in its intellectualism and impressive in its artistry, this is a magnificent achievement that is impossible to resist." - Booklist
This information about Turbulence 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.
Giles Foden was born in 1967 in England and spent his youth in Africa. Between 1990 and 2006 he worked as an editor at The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. In 1998 he published The Last King of Scotland, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award and was later made into a feature film. The author of two other novels and also a work of narrative nonfiction, in 2007 he was appointed professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich. He lives in Norfolk, England.
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