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Book rec
Night Over Water by Ken Follett. My expectations weren't that high, but I really loved it.
This book falls squarely in the "group of strangers, each with their own agenda, trapped together by circumstances beyond their control" genre. In this case, circumstance is a fictional flight of a real plane, the amphibious Boeing 314 Clipper. Pan Am's first trans-Atlantic flights were luxury "sleeper" flights (the seats folded into bunks) and the book fictionally extends the extremely brief tenure of the commercial Boeing 314 flights into the early days of WWII. The passengers include a family of fascists fleeing the U.K., a German scientist escaping the Nazis, saboteurs, criminals, a runaway bride, etc etc. It's a lot of fun and seems to be pretty well researched as far as I can tell. I particularly enjoyed the way the characters' storylines wove in and out of each other, and that the female characters were as fleshed out and had as much agency and interesting backstory as the guys did.
The book also did something I really liked with sexual consent, although this is slightly spoilery and slightly NSFW, so I'll put it under a cut.
I absolutely loved that with both of the book's major couples, as the on-plane romance ramped up, each couple came to a point where they were clearly on the verge of having sex, the woman decided she wasn't ready for it and said "no", and the guy accepted that answer and backed off. One couple ended up sleeping in the same bed, cuddling, without having sex at all, though they do later on. The other couple resumed later, with the woman initiating, and ended up mutually masturbating each other to orgasm; this is plainly referred to as sex, they were both very happy with it, and the woman considers herself to have lost her virginity. (This is the only instance I can recall, in a book I've read, of a woman losing her virginity via non-PIV sex, although I'm sure there must be others. The losing-her-virginity comparison isn't perfect because technically she wasn't a virgin to begin with -- she'd had multiple lovers, both male and female -- but her previous sexual experiences were unsatisfying enough for her that she explicitly makes the comparison herself.)
This book falls squarely in the "group of strangers, each with their own agenda, trapped together by circumstances beyond their control" genre. In this case, circumstance is a fictional flight of a real plane, the amphibious Boeing 314 Clipper. Pan Am's first trans-Atlantic flights were luxury "sleeper" flights (the seats folded into bunks) and the book fictionally extends the extremely brief tenure of the commercial Boeing 314 flights into the early days of WWII. The passengers include a family of fascists fleeing the U.K., a German scientist escaping the Nazis, saboteurs, criminals, a runaway bride, etc etc. It's a lot of fun and seems to be pretty well researched as far as I can tell. I particularly enjoyed the way the characters' storylines wove in and out of each other, and that the female characters were as fleshed out and had as much agency and interesting backstory as the guys did.
The book also did something I really liked with sexual consent, although this is slightly spoilery and slightly NSFW, so I'll put it under a cut.
I absolutely loved that with both of the book's major couples, as the on-plane romance ramped up, each couple came to a point where they were clearly on the verge of having sex, the woman decided she wasn't ready for it and said "no", and the guy accepted that answer and backed off. One couple ended up sleeping in the same bed, cuddling, without having sex at all, though they do later on. The other couple resumed later, with the woman initiating, and ended up mutually masturbating each other to orgasm; this is plainly referred to as sex, they were both very happy with it, and the woman considers herself to have lost her virginity. (This is the only instance I can recall, in a book I've read, of a woman losing her virginity via non-PIV sex, although I'm sure there must be others. The losing-her-virginity comparison isn't perfect because technically she wasn't a virgin to begin with -- she'd had multiple lovers, both male and female -- but her previous sexual experiences were unsatisfying enough for her that she explicitly makes the comparison herself.)