Before the Fall

Before the Fall is a novel by the American writer Noah Hawley, published in 2016.

Scott Burroughs is a painter whose career has not worked out, and he is on the aircraft by accident, invited by a woman he barely knows. The other passengers are two wealthy and influential men, their families and the crew, and the crash leaves Scott and the boy as the only survivors. The novel alternates between the aftermath, in which Scott is treated as a hero by some people and as a suspect by others, and the lives of the people who died, told in turn so that the reader understands what was at stake for each of them. Hawley is interested in how a story becomes public: the television coverage, the theories, and the way a man's ordinary life is read for evidence of guilt.

The book moves between the night of the crash and the years before it, and much of its suspense comes from what the passengers kept to themselves and from what the investigation never thought to ask.