Skybound: A Journey In Flight

Product Description

In her mid-thirties Rebecca Loncraine was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two years later, & after months of gruelling treatment, she flew in a glider for the first time. In that engineless plane, soaring 3, 000 feet over the landscape of her childhood with only the rising thermals to take her higher & the birds to lead the way, she fell in love. If illness meant Rebecca had lost touch with the world around her, gliding showed her a way to learn to live again. And so Rebecca travelled from the Black Mountains in Wales to New Zealand’s Southern Alps & the Nepalese Himalayas to chase her new-found passion: her need to fly with the birds, to push herself to the boundary of her own fear. Skybound is the story of that obsession & of Rebecca’s incredible journey from the ground, into the sky & back again. Taking in the history of unpowered flight, & with extraordinary descriptions of flying in some of the world’s most dangerous & dramatic locations, this is a nature memoir with a unique perspective; it is about the land we know & the sky we know so little of, it is about memory & self-discovery. Just as she finished writing Skybound Rebecca became ill again. She died in September 2016. & yet, Skybound is still a book about learning to live again: deeply moving, thrilling & euphoric, this is a book for anyone who has ever looked up & wanted to take flight.