Free Fall

Whem Kim Roth hears on the kitchen radio that flight FIN 770, bound for London from New York, has crashed off Long Island that evening, she realises that she doesn't know which of the many London-bound flights her mother has just taken. A call to her sister Anna in Johannesburg confirms her worst fears. She is asked to go to the crisis centre in the ballroom of an airport hotel, where five hundred bereaved relatives are told of the plane's three mile descent into the Atlantic. The mechanisms for dealing with tragedy on a massive scale are swiftly put in place; the refrigerated trucks, the grief counsellors, the briefings about the debris field. Rumours of missiles and friendly fire begin to circulate. A fragile comradeship forms among the bereaved. And Kim is forced to re-examine the bitterness and recriminations of her forty-year relationship with her mother, culminating in the final irony of having persuaded her to fly from South Africa to New York. Free Fall is both a riveting novel and a brilliant exploration of what happens when we are drawn into the vortex of a major tragedy.

ISBN 009943749X   DEWEY 823 ISBN13 9780099437499 (What's this?)   DEWEY edition DC21 Publisher Vintage   Pages 256 Imprint Vintage   Published in London Format Paperback   Height (mm) 198 Publication date 01 May 2003   Width (mm) 129 Library of Congress PR9369   Academic level General

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