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Benjamin Johncock was born in England in 1978. His short stories have been published by The Fiction Desk and The Junket. He is the recipient of an Arts Council England grant and the American Literary Merit Award, and is a winner of Comma Press's National Short Story Day competition. He also writes for the Guardian. He lives in Norwich, England, with his wife, his daughter, and his son. The Last Pilot is his first novel.
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Tell us about the conflict at the heart of your novel.
The Last Pilot is about a marriage in crisis. Jim is trained to deal very tightly with his emotions—that is essential for him to stay alive—but at the same time he is in a situation at home where he cannot maintain a healthy marriage. Gracie is laid back, but a no-nonsense sort of woman. In a lot of ways, she is Jim's equal during a time when men may not have seen their wives as equals. Jim respects that, but Gracie needs more from him. As much as he wants to be there, or thinks he is there for her, he really isn't, and that brings them to a crisis point. Jim begins to experience mental health issues that he is ill-equipped to deal with, and so that plays out against a backdrop of international conflict and the space race.
You seem to be an aviation aficionado.
I have a real interest in flying. Sometimes I think I would like to take flying lessons, but then I realize how totally bad of a pilot I would be. I'm quick to panic and can't handle a lot of things at once [laughs]. When I was four years old, we had a book at home that my dad would read to me about the Apollo missions, called Moon Flight Atlas by Patrick Moore. What captured me wasn't the rockets—...
Martha Ackmann is a journalist and author who writes about women who have changed America. Her essays and columns have appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. She also is a frequent ... (more)
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The Last Pilot
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The Mercury 13
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Elizabeth J. Church was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Her father, a research chemist, was drafted out of Carnegie Mellon University where he was pursuing his graduate studies and was sent to join other scientists working in... (more)
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The Last Pilot
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