Zeppelin

Thursday is practice night at St Saviours. It usually doesnt include a Zeppelin.

On Bonfire Night, with rockets going up all over the Potteries, a First World War airship drifts out of the dark over Stoke-on-Trent. Her engines are dead. Her gondolas are lit. And her drag rope has just caught the tower of a Middleport church in the middle of bell-ringing practice.

Tess Holdcroft is a supply teacher, a hopeless learner ringer and the only person in the tower who speaks German. When her seventy-nine-year-old dad steps across the gap onto the gondola ladder with a packet of oatcakes in his cardigan, she has to follow him. Inside she finds nineteen frozen, terrified men at their stations. They think its January 1916. They think theyve reached Liverpool. They think the fireworks are anti-aircraft fire. And at first light, when the engines come back, they mean to drop two tonnes of bombs on the lights below.

The police have cordoned off the churchyard with a man selling sparklers. The Armys bomb disposal team can see the bombs but cant explain the ship. The RAF has Typhoons in the air and orders to shoot. The first officer has taken command at gunpoint. Forty million people are watching a delivery riders livestream. And the vicar has just found a letter hidden in the vestry safe that explains the scorch mark on the tower, the corner of the churchyard with no headstones, and what really happened in Middleport one foggy night in 1916.

To get everyone home alive, Tess will need a wireless operator from Hamburg, a Bavarian mechanic who loves oatcakes, a captain who never wanted to bomb anyone, and the ringers of St Saviours, who have one night to ring the first full peal on their bells in sixty-eight years.

A big-hearted, funny and haunting British ghost thriller about bells, buried secrets and finishing the night properly.