It’s early for predictions, but I’m sure Rebecca Loncraine’s Skybound is going to be one of my books of the year. It’s a book that makes you look at the sky and the land with new eyes; that gives you a lift, in more ways than one.
Loncraine was 35, had finished a biography of L Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, and had a head full of plans, when in 2009 she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The illness and treatment overwhelmed her; for a long time she was scarcely able to talk, let alone write. Two years later, out walking with friends in the Black Mountains of Wales near her parents’ farm, she passed a gliding club and found herself booking a lesson for the next day. As she told the...