Constellation - Grand Prize for the Novel, Académie française 2014, Adrien Bosc

On October 27, 1949, Air France's new Constellation aircraft, launched by the flamboyant Mr. Howard Hughes, welcomed thirty-seven passengers. On October 28, the plane stopped responding to the control tower. It disappeared while descending on Santa Maria Island, in the Azores archipelago. There were no survivors. The question Adrien Bosc asks in this ambitious debut novel is not so much how, but why? What is the sequence of tiny causalities that, put together, sent the plane plummeting towards Mount Redondo? What is the objective chance, a notion dear to surrealists, that makes this steel tomb "necessary"? And who are the passengers? While Marcel Cerdan, Edith Piaf's boxer lover, is well-known, and the prodigious musician Ginette Neveu, whose violin was partially recovered years later, is remembered, the author intertwines their fates. "To hear the dead, write their minuscule legend, and offer life and narrative to forty-eight men and women, like so many constellations."