Leaving Earth: A Novel - Softcover

Humphreys, Helen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312255004 ISBN 13: 9780312255008

Publisher: Picador, 2000

Synopsis

Leaving Earth is a first novel marked by its perceptive, lyrical language and rich, fascinating characters. On August 1, 1933, two young women, the famous aviatrix Grace O'Gorman and the inexperienced Willa Briggs, take off in a tiny moth biplane to break the world flight-endurance record. Their plan is to circle above the city of Toronto for twenty-five days. With each passing day, the women's ties to humanity fall away and the intensity of their connection becomes as gripping as the perils that besiege them: fatigue, weather, mechanical breakdown, and the lethal efforts of a saboteur. In this extraordinary debut, Humphreys exhibits rare control, restraint, and poetry as she develops the relationship of two unusual women through the magical passage of flight.

About this title

Review:

"The plane slips from a spool of blue, stitches a confident loop in the sky. Willa stands by the hangar as the Moth roars above her head, growl of open throttle. The single figure in the rear cockpit waves as the plane flies low over the harbor airfield and then pulls up into a vertical climb. Up and up, the line so straight it could have been drawn with a ruler, could have been a harp string, the plane a note ascending."

Grace O'Gorman, the star-bright aviatrix of Helen Humphreys's debut novel, Leaving Earth, adores her Moth--a two-seat, open-cockpit biplane. It's the 1930s, and together they have wowed the world with stunts, solo long-distance flights, and other record-breaking trips. Glamorous "Air Ace" Grace feels most at home aloft, as opposed to down on Earth, in Toronto, with her husband. That, along with her competitiveness and affinity for fame, is why she's setting out to break the world flight endurance record. She teams up with a young female flyer, Willa Briggs, to circle Toronto for 25 days in August 1933.

In a spare yet warm style, Humphreys unfurls the pair's airborne life. She conjures the physical miseries it inflicts on the body--brought on by rain, cramped space, exhaustion--and makes the subtleties of that exhaustion clear as a cloudless sky. But beyond descriptions of physical discomfort is the emotional distress and elation Willa goes through, to which the author gives exquisite nuance. There's loneliness that forces introspection, yet joy washes over Willa, too--joy for a stripped-down life in the sky with Grace, with whom she is falling in love. Over the roar of the wind Grace and Willa develop a poetic sign language. Around this and around the experience of the sky, Humphreys winds Willa's highs and lows.

Following the Moth's flight is 11-year-old Maddy, whose father and Jewish mother work at a fading amusement park on the Toronto Islands. Maddy worships Grace and so naturally spends her August days tracking the circling biplane. Meanwhile her parents worry about work in the face of the depression and watch a growing anti-Semitism invade their home. From the earth and the sky Humphreys shapes a keen story about human frailty and potential, set when aviation was all about glamour, and World War II not so far away. Here, fear spreads and intimacy blooms. --Katherine Alberg

From the Publisher:

"A novel so beautiful in its reticinece and insight, featuring characters so seemingly fragile and endangered, that readers may well find themselves becomig curiously protective..Helen Humphreys delivers her perfect game." DAVID WILLIS McCULLOUGH,The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0312255004
• ISBN 13: 9780312255008
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256