Flight

(Hardback)

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'Suspenseful, dazzling and moving' Rumaan Alam
'Arresting and powerful' Lily King
'Breathtakingly propulsive and insightful' Leslie Jamison

Its 22 December and siblings Henry, Kate and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henrys house in upstate New York. This is their first Christmas since their mother passed. Without her once ever-present advice and gentle nudges to connect with each other when they need it most, theyve grown distant. 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 whilealso trying to decide what to do with their sole inheritance, their mothers house.

As each tries and fails and tries again to figure out how to reconcile their various needs and impulses around the house, they mustalso see whether they can and will remain a family without their matriarch. They are all feeling the strain but when a local child goes missing they are forced to come together, and all of them will cross a line.


Praise for Lynn Steger Strong

Furious, aching and razor sharp Emma Cline

A deeply intelligent and sneakily moving novel about having the ground fall away beneath your feet. Strong ingeniously undercuts conventional wisdom about what it means to be a success in this world Jenny Offill

A defining novel of our age of left-behind families... as if Anne Helen Peterson's viral burnout article and John Steinbeck's oeuvre had a baby Vulture

Elizabeth's anxious, raw voice ties these threads together, coalescing into a story about the price women pay for craving what's just out of reach Time magazine

Through Elizabeth's experiences and in her propulsive voice, the novel explores race, class, privilege, coincidence, family, friendship and love Guardian

A smart, sharp novel Elle

Strong strips away at the imbalance of advantages that ultimately injure us all and the collisions that never cease. Yet, in this stunning novel, she never loses sight of the irrepressible desire to love, connect and forgive one another Observer

Reviews

Lynn Steger Strong is a master of family life, a wise chronicler of economic struggles real and imagined, of dreams versus responsibilities, and of nuances in relationships of all kinds. Arresting and powerful,Flightexamines the possibility and pain of fierce love and hope in our time of looming existential threats Lily King, author of Writers and Lovers

A fateful few days in the life of two families becomes in Lynn Steger Strongs hands a clear-eyed examination of our current moment.Flight probes deeply into grief and its aftershocks,what binds us to one another, the meaning of art itself. It's a book whose fleet movements belie its ambition. Suspenseful, dazzling and moving RumaanAlam, author ofLeave the World Behind

A gorgeous novel, both intimate and expansive. Flight is packed full of wisdom about family, marriage, class, climate, love and loss. Lynn Steger Strong is a master of creating characters so funny, flawed and true that they feel like people you know. I couldnt put it down J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Friends and Strangers

Breathtakingly propulsive and insightful, Flight gripped me from the very first page and didnt let go. It asked my heart to pay better, closer attention to the world, because it pays such exquisite attention to the world: from botched gingerbread houses to cigarette breaks, every scene bristles and pulses with nuance. Strong is a writer who makes me feel reconfigured, more sharply attuned to the business of being alive; as if I have nerve endings that didnt exist before reading her. Flight is a story about how we lose and find each other again and how this finding is never done, because we are, all of us, many selves at once Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering and Make it Scream, Make it Burn

With razor-sharp pacing and luminous prose, Lynn Steger Strong aims her keen eye on the complexities of siblings, marriage, motherhood and grief. Flight is a wonderfully alive look at the ways we try defiantly and sometimes perilously to love one another. You will want to gulp this book down in one sitting, but I urge you to slow down because its charms should be savored Cynthia DAprix Sweeney, author of Good Company

With deft, discerning prose, Strong writes beautifully about mothers and the struggles, fears, and joys of motherhood... A quiet domestic novel that soars Kirkus Reviews

A compelling portrait of how love and resentment are often twin sides of the same coin. Flight is its own portrait of struggle and strife, and yet a smooth and utterly compelling read Vogue

Strongs writing soars effortlessly True reconciliation, safety, stability, fulfillment: These are destinations along a flight path forever uncertain though shot through, like this novel, with moments of transcendence Los Angeles Times

Strong is adept as characterizing this loss in all its manifestations, and in rendering the challenges inherent in three families trying to celebrate together Once again, Strong demonstrates her talents for perception and nuance Publishers Weekly

'Part of the sense of life in the book comes from Strongs distinctive prose style compressed, telegraphic and gestural, one in which the sharp noticing of what might otherwise seem like ordinary details about a character or an exchange takes on a resonating depth'New York Times

'Strong is an exacting observer of families and their idiosyncrasies, in the mode of Anne Tyler and Jonathan Franzen...Strong keeps Flightin motion with twists of language and revelation'Washington Post

Three siblings face their first Christmas without a mother in this moving novel about grief and family. As they attempt to navigate the new dynamic and perform familiar festive rituals, old resentments and tensions between them are revealed and it takes an emergency in the local community to pull them togetherGood Housekeeping

'Flightdoesnt just juggle the interior lives of six protagonists with great dexterity; it also carefully delineates who these people are to each other, and where anger and jealousy might clip the wings of their better angels... Tightly plotted and vividly rendered'USA Today

'With compassion and a deep sense of understanding,Flightexplores the nature of belonging, and what it means to truly be part of a community'Buzzfeed

Intricate and moving... reminiscent of Anne Tyler, that great chronicler of American familiesIrish Times

Author Bio

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and the forthcoming Flight. Her non-fiction and criticism has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, the LA Times, the New Republic, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Columbia University.