"Motherhood, modern life and sibling strife are shrewdly dissected in this poignant portrait of a family’s first Christmas after losing their matriarch."
To tell an intimate, multi-themed tale of modern America in little over 200 pages is quite something, and that’s exactly what Lynn Steger Strong has done with Flight. Exploring loss, motherhood, marriage, and the weariness, frustration and anger that can come in the wake of feeling a chasm between hopes, actuality and responsibility, this wears its fierce power in readable style.
Henry, Kate and Martin are about to experience their first Christmas since losing their mother. Alongside tension around the “what are we going to do with Mom’s house?” question, day-to-day strains snag as the siblings and their spouses struggle to get on through their very different ways of doing things, not least when it comes to parenting, and their different financial statuses.
Electric with flaws, the characters feel incredibly real, not least because their words ring with authentic frustrations. Add to this sharply observed scenes of family life, a desperate race-against-time to help a local family, and the siblings’ smouldering grief, and Flight’s potency gathers to a stirring crescendo.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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"Arresting and powerful, Flight examines the possibility and pain of fierce love and hope in our time of looming existential threats." -- Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers
"Suspenseful, dazzling and moving." -- Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind
It's December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry's house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother's Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother's house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help.
With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as "a defining novel of our age" (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps. Flight is a novel of family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, one that forms a powerful next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time.
Flight features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, General Fiction, Romance / Relationship Stories, Fiction, Book Club Recommendations, Recommendations
Flight is available in Paperback, Hardback
Flight was written by Lynn Steger Strong and published by Mariner Books an imprint of HarperCollins
Flight has 240 pages
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