IN WAR-TORN Britain of 1944, meteorologist Henry Meadows is sent to a remote Scottish outpost to befriend Wallace Ryman, a brilliant but reclusive scientist who is thought to have developed a weather forecasting technique more accurate than anything known to Allied scientists.
Meadows鈥檚 mission is to glean the secrets of the technique so that it can be used to determine the best dates for the D-Day landings.
In Turbulence, Giles Foden keeps the pages turning through a character-driven though rather clunky plot for which the weather, of course, forms a sympathetic backdrop. Part of the fascination is Foden鈥檚 fictionalisation of , on whom Ryman is based. Years ahead of his time, Richardson tried to calculate the weather using a mathematical model of the atmosphere in an era when forecasts were made by comparing the data with historical weather patterns. A feat, albeit with flaws, of fact-fuelled fiction.
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Faber