Successfully blending one man’s fictional story with real life events and related by a flawed and anxious young scientist, this is a complex and gripping tale of weather and war as the right conditions for D-Day is sought. It’s not as gripping as The Last King of Scotlandbut it’s certainly as enjoyable.
The D-day landings: the fate of 2.5 million men, 3000 landing craft and the entire future of Europe depends 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 maths prodigy from the Met Office, is sent to Scotland to discover Ryman's system and apply it to the Normandy landings. But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone could have imagined and events, like the weather, begin to spiral out of control.
Giles Foden was born in 1967 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 non-fiction, in 2007 he was appointed Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He lives in Norfolk.
The D-Day landings and the fate of 2.5 million men were dependent on the conditions in the English Channel on just one day, but could the weather be predicted accurately enough to ensure their safe execution? In a mission more eventful than he could have imagined, young meteorologist Henry Meadows is sent to the wilds of Scotland to extract information from scientist Wallace Ryman about his brilliant forecasting formula – the Ryman number. A gripping mixture of tension, excitement and wry humour.
