About the Book
From the award-winning author of The Mistress of Nothing comes a highly imaginative story of colliding worlds and extraordinary connections. Spring 2010. A volcano unexpectedly erupts in Iceland and airspace is shut down over Europe. Harriet works in local radio in London, and with most of her colleagues abroad, she seizes a unique career opportunity. Her husband, Michael, stuck in New York on business, travels to visit an old flame, and their teenage son, Jack, feeling liberated from normal life, takes an unexpected risk only to find himself in trouble. Meanwhile Emily, a young TV researcher, loses her adoptive father to a heart attack, and half a world away, a Pakistani migrant worker named Yacub is stranded in a Dubai labor camp.
Two years later, Yacub, attempting to stow away, falls out of the landing gear of an airplane onto Harriet's car in a London supermarket parking lot--and survives--while Emily accidentally captures it all on film. Yacub's sudden arrival in the lives of Harriet, Jack, Michael, and Emily catapults these characters into a series of life-changing events, ultimately revealing the tenuous, often unexpected ties that bind us together.
Inspired by real-life accounts of airplane stowaways, Landing Gear is about the complex texture of modern life, and how we fight the loneliness of the nuclear family to hold on to one another.
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's] narrative is buoyant and engaging, her tale beautifully crafted."--National Post (Canada)
"A rich, compelling novel. The story is told...so engagingly that I felt a great loss when I reached the end of the book."--Historical Novels Review
"An interesting story, exploring relationships between mother and child, master and servant, husband and multiple wives, as well as bringing out the political climate of Egypt during the 1800s."--The Oklahoman
"Endowing Sally with tremendous character, Pullinger successfully imagines an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances."--Publishers Weekly
"Explores the relationships people form across boundaries...This is a book you can't stop thinking about."--San Francisco Book Review
"In an utterly modern, spare novel, author Kate Pullinger gives readers an accurate, insightful glimpse at the world today."--Vancouver Sun
"Pullinger employs a luminous style in this affecting portrait of loneliness and communion."--Booklist
"Romance and tragedy baked in the blistering oven of British morals and prejudice."--Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Scorchingly powerful."--Good Housekeeping
"Tantalizing...Pullinger has done her research....Sally's observations...bring this lost world to life."--The New York Times Book Review
"The book's commitment to a historical and pragmatic voice is its true gem....A tough story of the unavoidable tragedies and celebrations that three simple, yet extraordinary, lives may yield."--Book Page
"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."--Quill and Quire starred review (Canada), 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."--Wayne Grady, author of Emancipation Day
"A highly sensual evocation of place and time, Kate Pullinger's The Mistress of Nothing is a journey down the Nile that explores the subtle complexities of power, race, class and love during the Victorian era. The book, narrated by the character of the maid, Sally Naldrett, has one of the most distinctive and memorable voices in recent literature."--Governor General's Jury Citation
"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."--The Toronto Star
"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."--Craig Davidson, author of Cataract City
"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."--Merilyn Simonds, author of A New Leaf
"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."--Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel
"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."--Brian Francis, author of Natural Order
