Angol
A flight from Rome to London. Two hundred and twenty-two people who don't know each other, each sealed inside their own life - until someone stands up in the aisle with a gun.
Marco and Silvia, husband and wife, are flying towards a crisis they've been postponing for years. Luca, a Naples police inspector travelling with his family, finds himself having to choose between his instincts and his children sitting three rows away. Six young people heading to an English language course - Giulia, Matteo, Sara, Lorenzo, Federica, Ahmed - are about to discover what they're truly made of. Professor Giuliani, a widower of twelve years, carries fifty years of experience reading people in difficult moments. Emma, six years old, holds a stuffed bear with one eye that closes more than the other - and without knowing it, she will become the most powerful force keeping the hijacker tethered to reality.
Tariq Mahmood is twenty years old, with three years of silent radicalisation behind him. When he stands up with a gun, he believes he has a plan. What he hasn't anticipated is that the plan will unravel not through force, but through a series of simple questions: Do you have a mother? How are you? What's her bear called?
Terror at High Altitude is not the story of a hijacking. It is the story of what happens inside people when time compresses and everything they have postponed - a conversation, a choice, a phone call never made - suddenly becomes the only thing that matters. It is a delicate and precise study of the human soul: lives that would never have crossed paths, thrown together by circumstance and united by a common purpose. Above all, it is a tribute to empathy - to the extraordinary power of seeing another person, truly seeing them, at the moment when everything depends on it.
When the plane lands at Heathrow, no one steps off the same person they were when they boarded.
