Turbulence Book

The D-day landings—the fate of 2.5 million men, three thousand landing craft and the entire future of Europe depend on the right weather conditions on the English Channel on a single day. A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing on an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead? And what is the relationship between predictability and turbulence, one of the last great mysteries of modern physics?

Wallace Ryman has devised a system that comprehends all of this—but he is a reclusive pacifist who stubbornly refuses to divulge his secrets. Henry Meadows, a young math prodigy from the Met Office, is sent to Scotland to uncover Ryman’s system and apply it to the Normandy landings. But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone could have imagined. When Henry meets Gill, Ryman’s beautiful wife, events, like the weather, begin to spiral out of control.

From Giles Foden, prizewinning author of The Last King of Scotland, a gripping blend of fact and fiction in a novel about how human beings deal with uncertainty.

Publishers Weekly

Foden emerged as a formidable storyteller with The Last King of Scotland, and now he tackles WWII and the beaches at Normandy from an unforeseen perspective: that of Henry Meadows, a Cambridge-educated meteorologist tasked with befriending the reclusive meteorological genius and conscientious objector Wallace Ryman and learning the secrets of the mysterious Ryman number for the Allies, who hope to use it to forecast the perfect moment to launch the D-Day offensive. Questions of turbulence abound as Meadows carries out his scientific reconnaissance amid fascinatingly sketched characters like prescient scientists Brecher and Pyke, Ryman's scheming wife, and the enigmatic Ryman himself, but it is the meticulous fusion of science and military history that dazzles, coming off like an exhilarating fusion of Richard Powers and John le Carré. As the deadline mounts and Ryman takes matters into his own hands, the quickly accelerating plot threatens to overwhelm both the book's methodical pace and the occasionally glutted cast of characters—but, by then, Foden's point, that certainty and probability are values batted about like balloons in the atmosphere, has pierced its target. (Aug.)