A wonderful, inventive, first novel (Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, is a great fan) set primarily during WW2. A vivid, highly original, funny, bitter-sweet picture of a vanished Britain, beset by order and chaos. The Navigation Log opens in 1918 with the birth of identical twins, Tom and William Anderson. We follow in extraordinary vivid episodes their early life until the autumn of 1940, by which time Tom is a Spitfire pilot, dog fighting over the coast of Kent, while his brother William, a teacher, accompanies his anarchic school Liberty Hall in a lunatic trek across the bomb strewn Kent countryside below. The son of an aircraft engineer himself, Tom's airborne exploits are written with an exceptionally vivid intimacy, while the author's gift for humour is brought to hilarious realisation on the ground beneath. Peopled with deftly memorable characters (the Polish refugee fleeing Europe, the crazed naturist headmaster), the book observes an England that may have vanished, but still resides in many a heart.