Blackbox

A darkly humorous debut combining a powerful imagination with an acute ability to observe life.

Cross a road, take a train or get on an aeroplane and you put your life in the hands of a stranger - every bit as screwed up, every bit as fallible, every bit as human as you are. Then they turn out not to be a stranger at all, and suddenly it's much worse.

So, meet an apparently disparate group of people - a comedian whose sole gag consists of committing suicide; an airline pilot terrified of flying; a psychiatrist more in need of therapy than his patients; and an air hostess trying to do the right thing - all of whom are connected to the tragic death of a stowaway on board flight AF266 in 1978.

Twenty-three years later, and despite their attempts to build new lives, the connections begin to emerge and, along with them, the truth about what happened. It's a truth held on stolen blackbox recordings, answer-machine tapes, sitcom outtakes, and court transcripts.

'Blackbox' is the story of an attempt to erase a life on tape.