A stunning debut which charts the turbulent flightpath between a planespotting son and a jetsetting father. In Final Approach: My Father and Other Turbulence, Mark Blackburn takes the reader along his lifelong struggle to find a place for himself outside the shadow of his womanising, bullying multimillionaire father. Amidst vindictive teachers and adolescent travails, power plays and a crumbling family fortune, Mark's infectious love for all things aviation shines through. Beginning at Heathrow, while waiting to board a flight to Cork where the ailing family estate awaits him, Mark takes a look back at a life defined by airports. From a schoolboy bullied for his love of planes to the childhood bliss of a holiday spent cataloguing jets with his brother, the presence of the estranged father is never too far away. It's at Heathrow again where an adolescent Mark is summoned to meet his father's foreign mistress, and Deauville airport where, in middle-age, he alights to negotiate a sale on behalf of his increasingly paranoid father, who is determined to spend away his riches 'til death. Every chapter has a new airport, and each ones brings Mark and the reader closer to the book's final approach. Dryly witty to the end, Final Approach offers a poignant insight into a man's struggle for self-determination. It's the trip of a lifetime. Take your seat and buckle up for take-off.
