larahlou17
In the soot-choked industrial valley of Sheffield, fourteen-year-old Edward Vance carries the weight of a shattered family on his narrow shoulders. His home is a daily battleground of grinding poverty, debt, and the haunting trauma of a father broken by the First World War. To keep the bailiffs at bay and his younger siblings from freezing, Edward bleeds his youth away over scrubbing brushes, coal sacks, and dawn paper rounds.
When a fleeting glimpse of silver Spitfires piercing the upper blue reveals a vision of freedom far above the filth of the earth, Edward makes a desperate, dangerous gamble. Armed with a stolen parish birth certificate, a forged signature, and a heart full of desperate resolve, he alters his age by four years and runs away to enlist in the Royal Air Force.
Boarding an LNER corridor carriage into the cold English mist, he meets three other runaways hiding behind bravado and smoke rings: George, a plow-share-raised giant from Nottingham; Alfie, a sharp-tongued London dock worker; and Julian, a vicar's son who gets carsick on a bicycle. Bound together by deception, terror, and the fierce camaraderie of boys forced to become men, Edward and his new brothers hurtle toward a sky filled with fire, where they must discover if speed and altitude can truly outrun the ghosts of their past.