A Boston Herald Book Club Pick

Set against the Battle of Britain, The Clouds Above evokes the extraordinary summer when Great Britain's survival lay in The Royal Air Force, two thousand very young men, are thrown directly into the fierce struggle with the Luftwaffe. Len, an RAF Sergeant pilot, and Tadeusz, a Polish pilot serving in the RAF, become close friends despite their obvious differences, each aware that neither of them is likely to survive.

In this tumultuous and uncertain time, Len falls in love with Stella, a young Women's Auxiliary Air Force radar operator. She is trying to endure her own war: making the transition from a sedate middle-class English life to service life. She tries to adapt to sharing crowded barracks with other young women, watching her fellow WAAFs die, listening to the battles in the air on her headset, and trying to find an intense, if brief, happiness with a young man who risks his life daily.

In chapters alternately narrated by the two young lovers, Len and Stella wrestle with the foolhardiness of a romance in wartime, even as the battle in the sky intensifies.

Drawing from his mother's diaries chronicling her own experiences as a nurse during the World War I, Andrew Greig has written a novel that is as compelling a love story as it is a war story. The Clouds Above deftly portrays both the adrenaline-rush horrors of aerial combat and the fragile but heightened romantic passions of wartime.