Long Flight Home

The First World War is over and air mechanic Wally Shiers has promised to return home to his fiancée, Helena Alford. But Wally never reckoned on charismatic fighter pilot Ross Smith, and an invitation to compete in the world's most audacious air race.

A £10,000 prize has been offered for the first airmen to fly from England to Australia. Smith is banking on an open-cockpit Vickers Vimy, a biplane with a fuselage that looks ominously like a coffin.

And who can resist a hero? Wally writes to Helena to say he won't be home for another year - and the love of his life is left holding her hand-stitched wedding dress ...

Using war diaries, letters and Churchill Fellowship research from along the race route, Long Flight Home recreates one of the most important - and largely forgotten - chapters in world aviation history.

Lainie Anderson's ambitious and moving novel is told through her narrator, Wally Shiers. The tale spans the decades and crosses the globe, and at his journey's end we're left peering down from an open cockpit on two beacons of truth. There is no heroism without honour. There is no legacy without love.

Praise for Long Flight Home
'This is a wonderful tale, superbly told. And it all happened!’ - Peter FitzSimons

'While the focus of this fine novel, based on a true story, is the competition of the first airmen to fly from Britain to Australia, what underpins it is a love story ... With this historical context, author Laine Anderson distils masterfully the impact this had on two protagonists ... For aviation enthusiasts, this book has an outstanding atmospheric sense of what it was like to fly in that era. Still, what lingers is the love story with its strength in war and endurance.' - Christopher Bantick, Weekly Times

Lainie Anderson has been a weekly columnist with Adelaide's Sunday Mail since 2007, and previously worked at the Herald Sun in Melbourne and The Times in London. In 2017 she travelled to nine countries on a Churchill Fellowship to gauge the significance of the pioneering 1919 flight from England to Australia and the Vickers Vimy aircraft now housed at Adelaide Airport. Lainie is South Australia's Epic Flight Centenary 2019 program ambassador.