Adrien Bosc’s bestselling book is a wide-ranging study of an Air France plane crash in the Azores in 1949, in which several high-profile passengers died. Bosc describes it as fiction, saying in an author’s note, ‘Constellation is unequivocally a novel, a truelife novel to probe the fiction at the heart of our lives.’ However, this is a French linguistic fudge: if Constellation were a made-up story it would lose most of its virtue. Anybody can invent stories; it takes time and determination to quarry out real-life ones.

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