{"product_id":"girl-at-the-edge-of-sky-isbn-9780735277045","title":"Girl at the Edge of Sky","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER\u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eGirl at the Edge of Sky \u003c\/i\u003eis 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 \u003ci\u003eWeb of Angels\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe River Midnight\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLily 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?\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eLily 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.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eGirl at the Edge of Sky\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Artfully imagined. . . . Impressive. . . . Given that [Nattel’s] skill is considerable and her craft formidable, the readers are the great beneficiaries. Lily Litvyak does indeed come to full animated life in a suspenseful, heart-rending story that is difficult to put down. . . . \u003ci\u003eGirl at the Edge of Sky\u003c\/i\u003e is rich with history and fictional engagement. . . . Nattel is superb.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Canadian Jewish News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Like the glow of the moon over a frostbitten field, \u003ci\u003eGirl At the Edge of Sky\u003c\/i\u003e illuminates the darkest days on the Eastern Front, revealing all the spark, courage, and tenderness of one of the most fearless fighter pilots you can imagine. Lilian Nattel portrays the remarkable story of Lily Litvyak with striking detail and imagery that is as beautiful as it is chilling.” —Ellen Keith, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Dutch Wife\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Lily Litvyak is the kind of character readers hunger for: larger than life, yet so real she inhabits the mind like one you’ve known and loved. A dark and dazzling novel, \u003ci\u003eGirl At the Edge of Sky\u003c\/i\u003e swept me up from the opening line and kept me spellbound. Nattel writes as well—and as wildly—as her unforgettable heroine flies.” —Alissa York, author of\u003ci\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Naturalist\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003ePRAISE FOR LILIAN NATTEL'S \u003ci\u003eWEB OF ANGELS\u003c\/i\u003e:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Right from the first sentence, \u003ci\u003eWeb of Angels\u003c\/i\u003e is astonishing, shocking, loving. Lilian Nattel leads us in an exploration of how our communities cope with deep heartache, the loss of our young, and how we, as individuals, cope with trauma and the communities we carry within ourselves. Step into this novel and you will find yourself submerged; wake from it, and you will find yourself transformed. \u003ci\u003eWeb of Angels\u003c\/i\u003e is a rare gift, perfectly named; within this novel, Lilian Nattel has offered us the work, the weave, of angels.” —Gail Anderson-Dargatz, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Cure for Death by Lightning\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Groundbreaking, demanding, brave and beautiful. \u003ci\u003eWeb of Angels\u003c\/i\u003e is a fiction about unspeakable evil rendered so (shockingly) true, the effect is devastating. The miracle is that, in Nattel’s hands, this book becomes a testimony to the fierce kindness in the human spirit, which battles evil and wins. Ultimately the book offers hope for what seems impossible: healing.” —Sheree Fitch, author of\u003ci\u003e \u003ci\u003eIn This House Are Many Women\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Some books grab you by the throat from the first sentence: \u003ci\u003eWeb of Angels\u003c\/i\u003e is one of those books.” —\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Thought Vox\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Leavened with love and wisdom . . . a daring, textured book that celebrates not just feminine strength but the human spirit.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Canadian Jewish News\u003c\/i\u003eBorn in Montreal, LILIAN NATTEL now lives in Toronto with her husband and two daughters. She is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe River Midnight\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Singing Fire\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eWeb of Angels \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eOnly Sisters\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cb\u003ePrisoner\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eUKRAINE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAugust 1943\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eHer Fall\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eShe bursts through the clouds and opens her eyes. The sound of engines is receding, the sky around her empty. There’s no one to see that her eyes are grey, that she wears a scarf made from parachute silk tucked inside her collar to keep it from chafing her neck, that her boots aren’t regulation, or that she is several kilometres above the earth on which human beings have evolved.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this war, people are always falling from the sky. They’re flung bouquets picked up by the wind, which carries them over fields and forests and towns. The wind fans pretty flames, it blows ash and smudges the sky. It spits the smell of mud, moss, rot, and the forge. It skims creeks and rustles leaves, it gropes in the gaps between wood and skin and blackening metal. The skin of a plane, the skin of a man, anything loose, anything fluid—blood, water—are all of a piece to the wind, which is neither friend nor enemy, though if you’re the one in mid-air, you might feel otherwise.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhere is the wind taking her?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe has no other thought; the roar of air fills her ear. It presses her skin, and in its touch there’s no protest from wounds, only the pleasure of wingless flight. She has as much substance as a god reclining on a bed of air. Above her, threads of cloud separate, and sun turns the heavens blue, more blue than colour can be. Everything she surveys is exquisite. The sky is her secret retreat, her private sin. She doesn’t need a plane or time. She has no past. She floats without fear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer hand pulls the rip cord, knowing what needs to be done now. She feels the yank of straps as her parachute opens, capturing air, halting flight and sound. Her weight dangles from the harness. She comes back to what passes for reality. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer name is Lily—Litvak or Litvyak. Something like that anyway.She’s blond by peroxide. She’s small by nature. Her age depends onthe papers you look at. Nineteen is a possibility. This day, August 1 and about midday, she blacked out as she slipped into the clouds, regaining consciousness when warmer air struck her face. The wind is pushing her westward.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSmoke hasn’t left her nostrils, nor the smell of tarry residue, though she sees no trace of the aircraft that were chasing her. Looking down, she finds her bearings by water: the meandering tendrils of green to the left are the Don River and its tributaries; the vast blue pool to the south is the Sea of Azov. She’s over the Donetsk region in the eastern Ukraine, close to the border with Russia but behind enemy lines. Like anyone who still survives, she’s had narrow escapes, and she plans on another as she descends, thinking the wind might drop her in the long grass of a field where she could hide until night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Don River leaves her field of vision. Mottled earth surges into shapes, the map below reconfiguring as she descends, more detailed than the one in her flight jacket and yet the same, made by an uneasy alliance of hands, nature’s and men’s: undulating rivers, lumpy hills, tracts of green and gold in squares and parallelograms. Men like geometry. Nature throws herself at her materials with abandon, which is how Lily flew her plane and drove her commanding officer crazy. She wears men’s underpants because the army can’t seem to get the hang of making any for the million women in it. As the harness pulls on her, the underpants get into the crack of her bottom, and the tugging bothers her more than her injured shoulder and the burn on her hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA squiggle in the landscape expands to a twisting line closer than the Don. This is the Krynka River, marked on her aviator’s map. It’s small, narrow, a peasant of a river invisible from any higher altitude. The golden fields could be wheat or rye, the green must be corn. It’s been ages since she’s smelled an unburnt field. Her world has been a desert of grey and black and red, its odour of crushed tanks and half-buried corpses reaching a kilometre high.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe river snakes through and around the fields, stopping short of the ruler-straight grey line that is a road. She closes her eyes for a moment, hoping to God, if there is one, that she won’t go to a POW camp. Any other fate she’ll accept. And though she doesn’t pray, she recites a rhyme her grandmother taught her: \u003ci\u003eDon’t give a fuck what people say, make your luck and make them pay.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the wind dies, she stops moving in a westerly direction anddrops straight down toward shades of green along the peasant river. Colour takes on dimension. Trees spring up: a stand of woods near a stream, and she’s rushing into their humble leafiness, these steppe trees that hug the water, a refuge of sorts. A branch catches her parachute, the harness yanks her shoulders. Still damp from the clouds, she pushes up her goggles and takes stock.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe’s wounded, but not mortally. She has a knife and her pistol. The war is two years old. She doesn’t think she’ll live long enough to have children.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNesting birds call and bring food to their fledglings as if she’s just a fruit or an oversized flower or even a large fungus growing out of the tree trunk. From here she can see the other bank of the Krynka River, steeper, rockier. Pasture without sheep, a ramshackle cottage and beside it a small garden. Beyond her sight, farther west, her grandmother is living under German occupation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis side of the riverbank is dense with low vegetation where she can hide if she detaches herself from the tree, but she can’t move. Her muscles are flaccid, her brain rambling; all this peaceful greenery is sapping her will. Where the sun falls on her between the leaves, she feels patches of warmth. Shell fragments are embedded in the flesh of her right shoulder. She can bend her arm a bit, but lifting it is agony. Blood seeps into the sleeve, a slow leak, and as long as she stays still, nothing will hurt more. The harness holds her likea child’s swing, like the ones in the Moscow park where she climbed her first tree. She tore her dress and knew she’d get spanked for it, but she pushed herself to the high branches, where she stood as still as if bark grew out of her bare soles, eye to eye with a yellow-chested bird. It was only later, after the spanking and after the rip was sewn up, that she felt remorse over the scarring of her favourite dress.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the fields beyond the woods, distant figures like cloth dolls bend and stand. If they come any closer, they’ll show themselves as human, and of all the varieties she knows, there are few she wishes to encounter while strapped to a tree. Unthinkingly, Lily moves her left hand, brushing its blistered back against some leaves. She can’t stop the odd sound that issues from the base of her throat, half gulp, half moan, and she clamps the uninjured palm over her mouth. She isn’t entirely alone; she hears voices, they’ve followed her from the plane.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eYou silly girl, what did you do to yourself? Don’t tell me you can’t get down. Am I talking to a wall? You need a smack to clear your ears? Pull the left strap high up. Like that. See how easy the hand goes through? It’s fine. Don’t make a noise. You want the neighbours to hear? If you’re so feeble, you have no business shooting down planes. How many today—two? My God, what am I going to do with you?\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe left strap is off. Panting, head hanging, sweat pooling under her leather cap, Lily holds on to the branch with her burned hand, all the weight of the harness on her shot shoulder as she tries to slide out of its strap. Her grandmother can scold, but Lily is done. She’s going to fall. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat a face you’re making. It isn’t time for a vacation, lazy girl. Forget the shoulder. Just pull the strap down. Get the arm out. So the parachute is stuck on a little branch. Pull. Again. Don’t sit with it in your arms like a wedding dress. Roll it up. Hurry. Stuff it into the pack.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer grandmother’s approval was never easy to come by. Lily has to stand, relying on her left arm to support her, clinging to the trunk as she seeks a foothold on a lower branch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eGood girl. My beautiful Lil’ka.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe next thing she knows, she’s on the ground.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen she opens her eyes, she’s on her back and dizzy, long grass striping her view. An accelerating aircraft exerts on its pilot a force several times that of gravity, but a good pilot won’t faint under the pressure. Yet she toppled like a toddler. It’s embarrassing. A fly walks on her cheek, an ant on her neck, everything that’s earthbound creeping and scratching like capitalists. She hopes there aren’t any snakes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs she rolls over, the sheathed knife in her belt knocks against her hip. She wants to put her hands on the ground and hoist herself up, but her hands have no class loyalty, the left rising to escape the biting grass, the right hanging at the end of a wet string of an arm that refuses to take any weight. Fine, then. She’ll manage without them. Leaning on her left elbow, she humps herself to her knees like a cripple sent home from the war. She slides the elbow up her thigh, moving her centre of gravity as she sits on her knees. Her right arm still dangles uselessly, but her flight jacket and uniform have soaked up its blood. Nothing’s dripped on the grass to mark her presence. Not yet. Softly cupping the underside of her left knee, she inclines right and pushes up from her buttocks and out with her left foot. Uninjured, dependable foot, a shock worker that meets and exceeds quotas. It deserves a medal, the Red Star at least. Shifting her weight onto it, she stands, triumphant at the exertion of her will, recklessly exposed. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom her magnificent ground-level vantage point, she sees tree trunks. Thin-leafed and thick-leafed bush. A small bird flying up. She turns her head. The steep and rocky left bank looms, a miniature version of great river embankments like the Don’s and the Volga’s. And, in her peripheral vision, a flash of brown that’s offhue, a tint that doesn’t match the woods, like a glint in the sky that is the enemy coming in from the sun. Overhead, crows are chasing a hawk, their loud caws covering the sound of her belated dive into the closest cover.","brand":"Random House Canada","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302663114981,"sku":"NP9780735277045","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780735277045.jpg?v=1767728142","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/girl-at-the-edge-of-sky-isbn-9780735277045","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}