Love, Death, Chariot of Fire

Reg Mitchell is a modest, decent man with a gift for designing fast aeroplanes. Two horrors seek him out – terminal illness, and Nazi Germany’s predicted invasion of his country. His response will change the course of world history.

The book is available through your local bookshop and library suppliers as well as on Booktopia, Amazon, Book Depository and elsewhere.

Paperback ISBN 978-0-6485232-9-1
266pp 153x234mm
• RRP AUD $29.95

epdf ISBN 978-0-6485233-0-7
epub ISBN 978-0-6485233-1-4
• RRP AUD $14.95

‘Here is a splendid love story of maker for machine: an inventor’s single-minded devotion to his imperilled country, and to the fighter plane that he hopes will save it. Winton Higgins handles the origin story of the Spitfire with the surefootedness of the historian, and eloquence of the poet. His drama of creation is made all the more poignant by its backdrop of destruction: the collective destruction of war, and the personal destruction of the cancer that Mitchell attempts to outpace just long enough to get the job done.’

Sara Knox author of The Orphan Gunner

‘If you love aeroplanes – and even if you don’t – this book is a must. There is a saying among pilots ‘if it looks good it will fly well’ and there can be no better example than the Supermarine Spitfire, the graceful and deadly British superhero of World War II. The Spitfire evolved into a fighter plane that could out-climb, out-run, out-turn and out-fight anything in the sky. Pilots didn’t like the Spitfire, they loved it. Winton Higgins has written a fluent and brilliantly researched story of the Spitfire’s designer Reg Mitchell, and the creation of a unique classic aircraft. Spellbinding!’

Peter Grose author of A Good Place to Hide

“In 1927 when we meet British aeronautical engineer Reg Mitchell, he is working on planes that win international races. Mitchell was a real person and the story of his achievements as told in this novel is a true one. Higgins portrays him as a man who saw the threat of rising European fascism at least 10 years before the outbreak of the Second World War. When he designed the Spitfire in the mid-1930s it was with a view to the conflict he saw coming, and the plane was a crucial element in winning the Battle of Britain. But Mitchell never lived to see any of it: working feverishly on designing the plane in the knowledge that his time was running out, he died of cancer in 1937, when only 42. This dramatic story of the human feeling and frailty behind the legendary aircraft is extensively researched and told with imagination and compassion.”

Kerryn Goldsworthy, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (Melbourne) 22nd Aug 2020