NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Girl at the Edge of Sky is a unique, thrilling, sometimes terrifying
novel based on the life and death of Lily Litvyak, a female Soviet
flying ace and fighter pilot shot down behind German lines in the Second
World War. From the bestselling author of Web of Angels and The River
Midnight.
Lily Litvyak is no one's idea of a fighter pilot: a tiny, dimpled
teenager with golden curls who lied about her age in order to fly. But
in the crucible of the air war against the German invaders, she becomes
that rare thing--a flying ace, glorified at home and around the world as
the White Lily of Stalingrad. The real Lily disappeared in combat in
August 1943, and the facts of her life are slim, but they have inspired
Lilian Nattel's indelible portrait of a courageous young woman driven by
family secrets to become an unlikely war hero. Even more powerfully,
Nattel takes another big leap, asking the compelling question: what if
Lily survived that last crash and became a prisoner of the Germans?
Lily lives in a world of horrifying risk, where the life and death
stakes are high in the air, but also on the ground. In the Soviet
system, everyone is an informer, even your best friend. Lily lives in
constant fear that she will be found out, arrested and executed as the
daughter of an enemy of the people. When she ends up a German prisoner,
as a Soviet officer and a Jew, the need for deception becomes even more
desperate.
Girl at the Edge of Sky is a masterwork of the imagination, subtle and
bold all at once, bringing us deep into the precarious life of a
remarkable woman who lies to fight for the country that would disown
her, and then lies to survive the enemy that would annihilate her.
