A plane has come apart at 34,000 feet.
Saroya Saul, age 37, a flight attendant living in Seattle, is the only survivor. She’s found wandering down a gravel road, dazed, her bones bearing spider web tracings of myriad hairline fractures. But how could she have survived such a fall?
Saroya has no memory of the event. Her entire inner circle is her ex-husband, Jackson, her maladjusted East Indian mother, Riza, whom she hasn’t seen in fifteen years, and her former dog, Homer, now deceased. Journalists, investigators, the curious, and the faithful have come to question her. Some believe it’s an impossible hoax—she couldn’t have been on that plane—even though insurmountable evidence says she was. Others have come to co-opt her miracle, believing God himself saved her.
An unexpected visitor from Peru, Raul Altazar, arrives and tells her of his 12-year-old daughter, Julia, who survived after being sucked out of a plane over the Andes, the only other known person to have lived through such a thing.
André Camus, the French new-age author, guru, and former child psychologist who himself had a near-death experience in the collapse of the Twin Towers, has come, and Saroya begins to feel he could be an ally. Marisol of Rome, a nun known for her sightings of the Virgin Mary and her miracles, has also come. She is determined to declare Saroya’s survival miraculous. Meanwhile, Saroya, a self-declared atheist, desperately needs a verifiable reason for her lone survival.
When investigators determine that a bomb brought down the plane, a fear of the unknown takes over, and a current grows to implicate Saroya. She learns that Camus is connected to the crash investigation and is no longer sure she can trust him. Meanwhile, a pandemic and the rising effects of climate change make it seem the whole world is falling.
Saroya flees Seattle’s increasingly adversarial investigation and the push-pull of religion, spirituality, and atheism. She sets out for Peru to learn more about Julia’s mystery, hoping that the girl and Saroya’s slowly returning memories can unlock the reason for their survival. Are they chosen, or just lucky?
What starts as a journey for answers to Saroya’s survival and life’s most profound questions also becomes a quest for connection in an increasingly crumbling world.
*Critiqued by six beta readers.
1st Runner-Up, William Faulkner/William Wisdom Award, Novel-in-Progress category (now complete!)