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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.
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.
"Strong is adept [at] characterizing...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
"With deft, discerning prose, Strong writes beautifully about mothers and the struggles, fears, and joys of motherhood. ... As the novel comes to a close, Strong offers moments of connection among the family members that feel genuine and earned. A quiet domestic novel that soars." - Kirkus Reviews
"[Strong's] characters feel both familiar and unique, and she is skilled at creating subtly devastating moments mixed with hope and tenderness. Written during a time of intense isolation, Flight reminds us that there is power in community, family, and those special times in which we don't have to do anything but be human." - Booklist
"A compelling portrait of how love and resentment are often twin sides of the same coin...Steger Strong has a raw and unflinching originality." - Vogue
"A fateful few days in the life of two families becomes in Lynn Steger Strong's 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." - Rumaan Alam
"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, Flight examines the possibility and pain of fierce love and hope in our time of looming existential threats." - Lily King
This information about Flight was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lynn Steger Strong is the author of Want and Hold Still. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Harper's Bazaar, Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Cut, New York Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at Catapult and Columbia University.
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