Jed Mercurio first sprang to attention with the wonderful medical TV series, Cardiac Arrest. At the time he was a practising doctor and wrote under a pseudonym.
He went on to write a novel, Bodies, in a similar vein, and of course this was made into that rarest of things – a decent BBC Three drama series.
Now he’s written another novel, and this has absolutely nothing to do with medicine or the NHS. To be fair, he’s also previously written TV dramas set well away from medical matters too.
In Ascent, we follow the career of the fictional Yefgenii Yeremin from being a child in the bombed out post-war Stalingrad, and into the Russian air force where he flew during the Korean War under the guise of a North Korean.
But not everything in his career is going perfectly, and the Space Race is taking place, with many top pilots on both sides becoming astronauts and cosmonauts.
I don’t want to spoil the story any more by saying how his life develops, but it’s evident that Mercurio has done an awful lot of research. The Korean war section of the book is full of dogfights and plenty of technical terms which are just enough to make you feel like you’re in the midst of something truly happening, but not so much that you’re completely lost with all the terminology.
A pacy book, and if you enjoyed the HBO mini-series of a few years ago, From the Earth to the Moon, you may well enjoy this.