Night over Water

by Ken Follett

Overview

#1 New York Times bestselling author Ken Follett takes to the skies in this classic novel of international suspense. Set in the early days of World War II, Night over Water captures the daring and desperation of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances—in prose as compelling as history itself. . . . 

September 1939. England is at war with Nazi Germany. In Southampton,  the world's most luxurious airliner—the legendary Pan Am Clipper—takes off for its final flight to neutral America. Aboard are the cream of society and the dregs of humanity, all fleeing the war for reasons of their own . . . shadowed by a danger they do not know exists . . . and heading straight into a storm of violence, intrigue, and betrayal. . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101126684
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/06/2004
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	3,120
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ken Follett is one of the world’s best-loved authors, selling more than 160 million copies of his thirty books. Follett’s first bestseller was Eye of the Needle, a spy story set in the Second World War. 

In 1989 The Pillars of the Earth was published, and has since become the author’s most successful novel. It reached number one on bestseller lists around the world and was an Oprah’s Book Club pick.
 
Its sequels, World Without End and A Column of Fire, proved equally popular, and the Kingsbridge series has sold 38 million copies worldwide.
 
Follett lives in Hertfordshire, England, with his wife Barbara. Between them they have five children, six grandchildren, and three Labradors. 

Hometown:

Hertfordshire, England

Date of Birth:

June 5, 1949

Place of Birth:

Cardiff, Wales

Education:

B.A. in Philosophy, University College, London, 1970

Editorial Reviews

Follett is a master.

Washington Post Book World

The opulent interior of the first airliner, the Pan American Clipper, on a transatlantic flight from Southampton, England, to New York in war-darkened 1939, is the setting for Follett's high-flying caper, guaranteed to hold the reader in his seat. Recalling a time when air travel was an exotic adventure, master of epic suspense Follett (Pillars of the Earth) spins an excruciatingly taut drama on the aerial equivalent of the Orient Express. Persons unknown kidnap the wife of Clipper engineer Eddie Deakin from their home in Maine in order to force Deakin to maneuver an emergency landing in the choppy waters off Bangor. Apparently the shadowy conspirators plan to remove one of the passengers, an intriguing group who include an FBI agent transporting an extradited mafioso; a Russian princess; a British industrialist chasing his wife and her lover; an American movie star; an Oswald Mosely-like aristocrat turned fascist, his daughter and her lover, a young jewel thief. Details of early aviation firmly establish the cast in their era and a tantalizing mosaic of subplots whisks the reader through a whirlwind of romance and intrigue. Follet soars to a thoroughly satisfying ending with aeronautical precision. This is his best since The Eye of the Needle.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

With the Dark Ages (The Pillars of the Earth, 1989) out of his system, Ken Follett returns to the spies, sex, and Nazis that did so well for him in Eye of the Needle. Fascinated by the huge flying boats launched by Pan Am in the late 1930's to fly the north Atlantic route, Follett has cooked up a sort of Airship of Fools or Flying Grand Hotel about a Clipper load of rich folks and lowlifes fleeing England after the declaration of war. The passengers include a fascist marquess and his family—so much like the Mitfords as to include a Nazi daughter and her socialist sister; a cuckolded industrialist chasing his pretty wife; an aging movie star; a Jewish refugee physicist; a suspected mafioso; a rich, powerful, but unloved American widow; the widow's weak, treacherous brother; and the handsome young jewel-thief without whom no such epic is complete. The danger that hangs over all these worthies is sabotage of the flight plan by an otherwise trustworthy flight engineer whose wife is being held captive in Maine by nameless rotten scoundrels. The merciless kidnappers want the plane set down early in order to remove a nameless someone before it reaches New York. Since the plane flies rather slowly and since there are three refueling stops, and since the beds make up into comfortable little berths, there is plenty of time for the passengers to search for the marchioness's priceless rubies, counterplot against the bad guys, stretch the legs in Irish pubs, quarrel, have reconciliations and indulge in a fair amount of good, healthy sex. No technothrills. No psychodrama. No fine writing. Hours of good storytelling. (Book-of-the-Month Split Main Selection for November)

Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Night over Water

"Excruciatingly taut . . . his best since Eye of the Needle." —Publishers Weekly

"Follett is a master." —The Washington Post Book World

"Few authors deliver as consistently as Follett." —Pittsburgh Press

"Follett really knows how to tell a story." —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution 

From the Publisher

Follett’s early thriller, reminiscent of the 1950s’ classic THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY, follows a plane load of passengers traveling thirty hours from England to the U.S. two days after the start of WWII. The Pan American Clipper is packed with a whole cast of characters, including a scientist fleeing the Nazis, a Mafioso being transported back to justice by an FBI agent, a movie star, a thief, a princess, and a Fascist . To complicate matters, one of the crew's family members is kidnapped to force the flyer to orchestrate an emergency landing. Tom Casaletto's glib performance makes this seemingly endless journey fly by with ease. His many accents are first-rate and more than make up for his tendency to pause unexpectedly in the middle of a sentence. A.L.H. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

APR/MAY 05 - AudioFile