A choice of first novels | 17 November 2016

Constellation by Adrien Bosc (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) picks nimbly along the divide between fiction and non-fiction. It’s really a speculative group biography, telling the story of a Air France plane crash in the Azores in 1949, and the lives of the plane’s passengers, mostly (except for a quintet of migrating Basque shepherds) of an appropriately stellar socio-economic stratum.

It does a fair job of knitting the known into the unknown, hopping from seat to seat like a solicitous flight attendant, shifting pace and perspective, throwing some metaphorical flesh on to the bare bones of what remains an unsolved tragedy (astrology, Bergson’s theory of durée, even — somewhat improbably — a boxing match between the ill-starred Flight F-BAZN and the plane sent out by investigators to shadow its last minutes). Bosc trips over the historic present tense from time to time, as almost everyone does who uses it; and his disinclination to use invented material means that the characters aren’t much fleshed out (though there’s a spicy love letter from Edith Piaf to her lover Marcel Cerdan, en route to fight Jake LaMotta in New York).