Publisher's Synopsis
1957, a hot August bank holiday, an airshow in a northern English city: Blaise, a French stunt airman, prepares to leap from a Dakota on balsa-wood wings of his own construction. Among the thousands waiting below on the ground are the members of Cissie Conolly's troubled family. She has reached a crisis in her life: she wants to open a flower shop; her husband Joe has escaped into drink; her sister, Lydia, harbours deep suspicions about Cissie's instinctive understanding with Captain Jack, Lydia's elderly husband. Meanwhile Cissie's 7-year-old son, Graham, sulks in his back garden, left at home with the boozy, restless Joe, while Captain Jack, blind and dying, is allowed to go to the airshow with the boy's mother and aunt. Graham has not seen his mother for twenty years but in the early nineties he returns to the northern city to work as a hotel chef and he and his mother are brought to face, in their own ways, the enormous secret that has shaped their whole lives.
