Jean Batten

Ian Mackersey's biography of the New Zealand-born flier Jean Batten, who became one of the most celebrated aviators of the 1930s, is built on private papers discovered after her death. He also conducted hundreds of conversations with people who had known her, and the result sheds light on a life that was far more complicated than her public image suggested.

The book opens with Batten's puzzling vanishing in Majorca in 1982, an event that left her whereabouts unknown for close to five years and fed speculation for much of that time. From there, Mackersey moves back through her career, offering an account of the pioneering flights that made her famous and the personal circumstances surrounding them.