The Last Pilot: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of July 2015:The Last Pilot is filled with fast planes, wide desert, skies larger than the land, and characters whose aches and pains, hopes and dreams quickly become your own. Jim Harrison is an Air Force test pilot in the 1950s – he flies planes at Mach-speed in the name of science, speed and as the years go by, to beat the Soviets – and returns home in between flights to a wife he loves and a bar with a cast of characters that is as devoted to flight as he is. Harrison and his wife, Grace, have been hoping desperately for a child, and when she finally gives birth all seems right in the world. But after two years of life, their daughter passes away: it is heart-pounding and tragic. As his wife retreats, he throws himself at work, becoming one of the first astronauts selected to go to the moon, but his daughter’s death has affected him far more than he realizes. Tightly told with searing uncomplicated prose, The Last Pilot is as engaging for its emotional gravitas as it is for its enthralling story of the race to space – I couldn’t put it down. --Al Woodworth