While the World Waited - by Peter Hernon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Paris, 1927. The city is gripped by Atlantic Fever as celebrated aviators race to be the first to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Some have already died trying. Wes Kennan, a young reporter for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, draws the assignment nobody wants: an unknown flier planning the unthinkable, a solo crossing in a single-engine plane. Charles Lindbergh takes off in the rain. Twenty-five hours later, falling asleep over the Atlantic and losing control of his aircraft, something happens that cannot be explained.

While the World Waited: A Novel of the Lindbergh Flight and Miracles of 1927 follows Kennan as he covers the historic landing in Paris. A Catholic visionary tells him something supernatural saved the pilot's life. Kennan wants to know if it's true, but Lindbergh won't speak of it.

Kennan doesn't believe in the supernatural. He believes in the love of two women: Lucille, an American graduate student carrying his child, and Anna, a Jewish law student. Then a second miracle shakes his certainty. An American doctor saves Lucille's life after a dangerous miscarriage, a doctor who is not at all what he appears to be. When Kennan meets Lindbergh one last time, in Berlin in 1936, he knows the truth. Sometimes the veil over the invisible world is lifted to give witness.

A historical novel of 1920s Paris, the dawn of transatlantic flight, and the question of miracles in the modern age.

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