Turbulence

Turbulence

David Szalay

From the acclaimed, Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of All That Man Is, a stunning, virtuosic novel about twelve people, mostly strangers, and the surprising ripple effect each one has on the life of the next as they cross paths while in transit around the world.

A woman strikes up a conversation with the man sitting next to her on a plane after some turbulence. He returns home to tragic news that has also impacted another stranger, a shaken pilot on his way to another continent who seeks comfort from a journalist he meets that night. Her life shifts subtly as well, before she heads to the airport on an assignment that will shift more lives in turn.

In this wondrous, profoundly moving novel, Szalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the planet in twelve flights, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers or estranged siblings, aging parents, baby grandchildren, or nobody at all. Along the way, they experience the full range of human emotions from loneliness to love and, knowingly or otherwise, change each other in one brief, electrifying interaction after the next.

Written with magic and economy and beautifully exploring the delicate, crisscrossed nature of relationships today, Turbulence is a dazzling portrait of the interconnectedness of the modern world.

Turbulence - Reviews

“Elegant… Impressive… Page by page, Szalay’s mixture of directness and withholding looks increasingly masterly.”

The Financial Times

“A (world) tour de force, an exploration in fiction of the concept of six degrees of separation. . . . The chapters are tiny cross sections of lives, lovingly examined under the writer’s micr...

Kirkus

“Presents us with a series of lives that feel at once profoundly particular and yet also emblematic, a portrait of our species at a time of crisis… What Turbulence shares with its prede...

The Guardian

“Profound… Unexpectedly moving… Szalay’s gift for inhabiting entirely different lives is as remarkable and spooky as ever.”

The Times

“Turbulence is a sleek machine with a cool tone… Szalay is a gifted writer.”,

Dwight Garner

“Masterful. . . . Its intensity is surprising. . . . Much of the fun of Turbulence is discovering how Szalay will upend the reader’s perspective of a character from one chapter to the next… ...

The Washington Post