HALF FLIGHT

Gallipoli became a legend. Their war was almost forgotten.

In 1915, nineteen-year-old Edward “Ned” Fletcher is a motor mechanic from Point Cook with his eyes fixed on a new kind of machine — the aeroplane. He joins military aviation believing he can learn aircraft engines, work close to home and one day bring that knowledge back to his father’s workshop.

Instead, the war carries him thousands of kilometres from everything he knows, into Mesopotamia with the tiny and little-known Australian Half Flight.

Among unreliable aircraft, brutal heat, desperate sieges, hunger and captivity, Ned is forced far beyond the life he imagined. His mechanical skills become tools of survival, while memories of home — and the promise he made to Lilly before leaving — give him something worth surviving for.

But getting home will demand more than endurance. Ned must learn to adapt, escape and keep moving through a war that seems determined to erase the men caught inside it.

HALF FLIGHT is an Australian historical novel of war, love, survival and the extraordinary men whose campaign was almost lost to history.

He went to learn about the future. First, he had to survive the past.