Description:

SUMMARY: From the highly acclaimed and prizewinning author of The Last King of Scotland (“Clever, and fluently written”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times): a heart-stopping race against time as British and American scientists attempt the impossible—to get millions of Allied troops secretly across the English Channel for D-day.As the plans for the invasion of Normandy take shape, the fate of 2.5 million men and the future of Europe come to depend on the right weather conditions over the 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, a reclusive pacifist, has devised a system that comprehends all of this. Henry Meadows, a young prodigy, is sent to Scotland to discover Ryman’s system and apply it to the Normandy landings. But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone has imagined, and, like the weather, events begin to spiral out of control.A gripping blend of fact and fiction in a novel about how human beings perceive and ultimately cope with uncertainty.