On 27 October 1949, a Lockheed Constellation passenger plane left Paris for New York. Hours later, it disappeared on approach to its scheduled stopover in the Azores. It was found on a mountainside five miles from its intended landing zone. There were no survivors.

Adrien Bosc’s magnetic debut novel is a memorial to an air disaster that happened half a century ago. But it is also a love song to the forgotten lives that every tragedy scatters around it like so much debris, and a poignant investigation into the nature of collective tragedy.