Landing Gear: A Novel - Softcover

Pullinger, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476753210 ISBN 13: 9781476753218

Publisher: Touchstone, 2015

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of The Mistress of Nothing comes a highly imaginative story of colliding worlds and extraordinary connections, revealing the tenuous, often unexpected ties that bind us together.

When everything was falling apart, someone fell into place...

Suburban London housewife Harriet spends her days doing what she’s worst at. She grocery shops for her family who eats too much, parents a son who refuses to communicate, and tries to be a wife to a man who hasn’t embraced her in years. But what starts out as a mundane trip to the supermarket turns her world upside down when a mysterious man named Yacub falls out of the sky from the landing gear of an airplane and lands on her car in the parking lot—and survives. He’s starving and freezing cold—what else can she do other than bring him home to her family?

Suddenly her son has stepped away from the video games and her husband is looking at her once again—even if it’s because they think she’s crazy for taking in a complete stranger who stinks of gas. And just who is Yacub, this young man who escaped from a Dubai labor camp and stowed away in the belly of the plane to travel around the world? Is it an extraordinary coincidence that he’s dropped into Harriet’s life just as a long-buried secret from her past threatens to come to light?

Inspired by real-life accounts of airplane stowaways, Landing Gear showcases the complex texture of modern life, and how we sometimes need help seeing what’s right in front of us.

About this title

About the Author

Kate Pullinger is the author of several novels and collections of short stories and collaborated with Jane Campion on the novelization of the film The Piano. The Mistress of Nothing, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, was her American debut. She lives in London. Visit her website at KatePullinger.com.

Review

"Pullinger employs a luminous style in this affecting portrait of loneliness and communion." Source: Booklist, on Landing Gear

“Despite the many serious things that happen in Landing Gear, the novel is a humorously lighthearted read with many laugh-out-loud moments. . . . Truly a 21st-century story about holding onto family and secrets in the Internet age.” Source: The Toronto Star, on Landing Gear

"[Pullinger's] narrative is buoyant and engaging, her tale beautifully crafted." Source: National Post (Canada), on Landing Gear

“In an utterly modern, spare novel, author Kate Pullinger gives readers an accurate, insightful glimpse at the world today.” Source: Vancouver Sun, on Landing Gear

"There is an unexpected lightness to the narration, a quality that can be attributed to Pullinger’s sharp and precise prose. . . . A fitting follow-up to its award-winning predecessor, Landing Gear is a beautiful and profound story about finding love, peace, and meaning in a too-busy world." Source: Quill and Quire starred review (Canada), on Landing Gear

“Innovative, enthralling, kinetic, and often subversively funny. Alongside Landing Gear’s stowaway, Yacub, we free-fall and rip a hole right through modern society’s illusions of any shared comfort zone. I loved the headlong rush, the imperiled tenderness.” Author: Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel, on Landing Gear

“Strap yourself in and get in a comfortable position. Once you start Landing Gear, you won't be able to put it down. Pullinger takes you on turbulent and exhilarating ride through modern family relationships, our cultural divide, and the unexpected things that come crashing into our lives.” Author: Brian Francis, author of Natural Order, on Landing Gear

"Kate Pullinger’s exquisite writing draws us into a world in which characters negotiate between the probable and the all-but-impossible. 'How can they survive this?' we ask ourselves, and then it hits us: we all do." Author: Wayne Grady, author of Emancipation Day, on Landing Gear

"Landing Gear is a wonderful novel, a novel of secrets—it is a novel of many other things besides, but this is what held me to the narrative: secrets, each carefully and cleverly revealed, all abetting a propulsive storyline that offers up startling revelations to the very end. This is the work of a writer at the top of her game, and I absolutely loved it." Author: Craig Davidson, author of Cataract City, on Landing Gear

“A volcano, an airplane, an immediate, long-ago fall. From an extraordinary premise – the disconnections of our airborne world – Kate Pullinger weaves together fragments of four lives, unfolding in disparate corners of the world, lives that intersect finally in small-town England. A portrait of a modern nuclear family – explosive, searing, and the basic unit of life – Landing Gear is truly a novel for our brave new world.” Author: Merilyn Simonds, author of A New Leaf, on Landing Gear

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1476753210
• ISBN 13: 9781476753218
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320