Henning Boetius – författare

For all those who love novels like Fatherland by Robert Harris, The Phoenix – a brilliant thriller based on the inside story of the airship disaster – is a great find.Airships were the Concordes of their era – elegant, exciting, luxurious – and the Hindenburg was Germany's pride. When it mysteriously exploded on arrival in the US in 1936 Goering pronounced the disaster an 'accident'. However, whispers soon circulated that it was sabotage. But by whom and why? And why were 28 of the survivors declared dead by the Nazi authorities?Birger Lund is one of them. Horrifically burnt in the flames, he is unrecognisable even to himself, but like the phoenix from the ashes, he arises from the dead with a new face and a new identity. However he realises he cannot embrace his future without confronting his past. So, briefly reunited with the girl he fell in love with ten years before on the Hindenburg's last voyage, he treks across post-war Germany in search of the truth about the crash. His journey leads him to a remote island off the north coast of Germany – to the home of the last pilot on the Hindenburg. However, the islanders appear to have not accepted the end of the war, and are determined to protect – with violence, if necessary – any secrets the pilot may have…The author is himself the son of one of the officers on the Hindenburg.

The year is 1947, ten years after the famous zeppelin Hindenburg burst spectacularly into flames while landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The cause of the disaster is still a mystery. The airship was a symbol of world peace and German technological prowess and was carrying important American industrialists and high-ranking Nazi officers. The reasons to think the crash was something other than a horrible accident are manifold and contradictory. Birger Lund, a survivor, suspects sabotage. Lund learns that Edmund Boysen, the officer at the controls at the time of the explosion, also survived the disaster and has retreated to his childhood home, an isolated xenophobic island where the politics of Nazi Germany live on. Seeking answers, Lund tracks him there.And there the reader ventures into Boysen’s discovery of the science and wonder of the fabulous dirigible, written with the authority that only one who has lived with the mythic tales of the Hindenburg could understand. For the author, Henning Boëtius, is the son of the only living member of the crew of the Hindenburg–the man who, indeed, was at the controls. In a fast-paced narrative that unfolds against the background of fascist Germany, The Phoenix combines a love story, an exploration of the physics of air travel, and a frightening re-creation of–after the sinking of the Titanic–perhaps the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century. This is historical fiction at its best.