RESULTS

Martagon, an engineer by profession and a loner by nature, falls head over heels in love for the very first time. He is overseeing the construction of an airport in France, exploiting his cutting-edge expertise in glass technology. The land on which the airport is built belonged to a feuding brother and sister, and it is Marina, the sister, who throws the detached and rational Martagon so thoroughly off balance. Marina is beautiful, flamboyant, and completely irresistible. He takes risks to be with her, loses his way both professionally and personally, and ends up questioning values he once took for granted. Flight is ultimately a story of loss. It's an international novel of the new Europe, and the need to 'belong' somewhere.
Management Teaching use: This novel contains a detailed description of a merger/takeover in the construction industry and the subsequent changes that are made in the newly formed company. Strategy students will find this extremely useful particularly as it looks at the role that individual personalities play in determining the outcome of negotiations between organisations. The clash of philosophies, which are fundamental to the two organisations, will provide a basis for discussion on the importance of organisational culture. Students can also use the text to discuss the stress upon consultants who take on large projects and the relationship between these consultants, their clients and the companies they inevitably have to work with.

The love affair between the writer Elizabeth Bowen and the elegant and charming Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie blossomed quickly after their first meeting in 1941 and continued over the next three decades until Bowen's death in 1973. Their's was a passion that flourished in the heightened, dangerous atmosphere of wartime London that Bowen wrote about so vividly in her novels. When Ritchie's diplomatic career took him further afield - to Paris, Bonn, New York and Ottawa - the lovers wrote to one another continuously, sharing their hopes and fears, their boundless affection for one another, and their longing to be together again. Published for the first time in this exquisite volume, accompanied by extracts from Ritchie's remarkably candid diaries, the love letters of Elizabeth Bowen reveal a passionate, intelligent, eloquent, strong-minded and wonderfully funny woman. They also reveal a man bewitched by her writer's mind and imagination, and by her adoring vision of him as a greater man than he ever felt himself to be.