WINGSPAN: WINGSPAN, cartea 1

Harish Raghav Rao is twenty-two years old, suspended from college, and entirely his father's son. Which is the problem.

On a balcony in Coorg, a woman he is half in love with tells him he is Raghav Rao's shadow. That he has never once stood in his own light long enough to know what shape it makes. She leaves the next morning. He drives back to Pune and decides to build a jet engine company.

What he has: fifty lakhs of his father's money, a rented floor in the Bhosari industrial belt, and a retired DERA engineer who agrees to look at the problem and reserves judgment on the boy.

What he does not have: any idea what he is walking into.

India does not make a single commercial jet engine. Not one. The state has been trying to certify a military engine since 1986 and has not managed that either. The pressure surface of a turbine blade is cut to eighty microns, and the difference between a component that holds and one that fails is a number too small to see. And the most dangerous man he will ever meet is the one who is genuinely, warmly pleased to see him.

Wingspan is the first novel of The Ignition Trilogy: a book about what a young man builds, what is taken from him by a document he signed himself, and what he builds after that, which is not an engine. Its idea is that stability does not always come from one force overcoming another. Sometimes it comes from the competition itself.

The engineering is real and is not decoration. Three appendices at the back take the science further for readers who want it.