ABOUT
THE BOOK

I will fly at last. I will unfold my wings. I will unpack my head. I will step back outside. One day I may even make love again. But one thing at a time. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Film mogul, aviator, addict, inventor, visionary, recluse, serial womanizer, political meddler: Howard Hughes was one of the strangest and most significant figures of the twentieth century. His obsessive-compulsive disorder would end up crippling and isolating him; in the end he self-medicated his way into oblivion.

It’s a summer night in 1973, and holed up in his hotel penthouse in London, Hughes can’t sleep. Tomorrow he takes control of an airplane for the first time in more than fifteen years. As the reclusive, drug-addled billionaire waits for the dawn, the shape and preoccupations of the times emerge from his ruined psyche; a world of oil, flight, money, movies, drugs, sex, power, greed, fear, yearning America.

Blackly funny, muscular and rhythmic, transcendent and debauched, God of Speed is a fever dream, a giant and extraordinary leap of the imagination into the fractured mind of a man who was both great, and greatly fallen.