Flight: A Novel

In her haunting debut novel, Flight, Ginger Strand creates an unforgettable portrait of a midwestern family navigating an indelibly changed world. Will Gruen loves to fly. As a Michigan farm boy, he longed to clear a furrow through sky, not land. Since then, he has pursued speed and forward motion, from his Air Force service in Vietnam to his thirty years as a commercial pilot for TWA. His passion for flight is matched only by his love for the family farm he considers his personal refuge. But in the aftermath of September 11, Will's world implodes. As he nears mandatory retirement, his beloved airline has collapsed. His wife is turning his farm into a bed-and-breakfast. His older daughter has chosen an open marriage, and her sister has fled seven hundred miles away to New York. Now, with the wedding of their younger daughter approaching, the Gruen family is coming home. Over three emotional days, the past collides with the present, secrets are revealed, new ties are made and old ones broken as each of the Gruens stands at the brink of taking a step that could not only change the path of one life but could alter the family's course. Deftly entwining the voices of Will and his colorful family, Strand creates a dazzling, multilayered chronicle of ordinary Americans in an era of sweeping hange -- and of people with only love to keep them aloft in an uncertain world.

Ginger Strand was raised in Texas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Her fiction and essays have appeared in many places, including The Believer, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, and The Carolina Quarterly. She has been awarded fiction residencies by Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She lives in New York City.

ISBN: 9781451643398
Format: Paperback
Pages: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: April 09, 2011

"Strand's debut is an absolute knockout of a novel, a multilayered story of a midwestern family flying in directions no one -- least of all any of them -- could have imagined. Stunning, surprising, and at times as thrilling as a first biplane ride, Flight is rich with the intimate knowledge of how families struggle to work out their lives. Dazzlingly written and aloft with humor, Flight truly soars." -- Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble and Coming Back to Me "Flight is an intelligent, compassionate portrait of one midwestern family at a complex emotional crossroads. Ginger Strand's depiction of the dynamics between parents and children, spouses, siblings -- the dense fabric of family, its secret ardors, strifes, and sacrifices -- is deft, insightful, and deeply satisfying." -- Darcy Cosper, author of Wedding Season "Ginger Strand trumps Wally Lamb's trick of writing against gender. Flight's Will Gruen is an American hero -- pilot, farmer, family man -- and he may be going down, but Strand's dead-on reckoning of his heart has me flying high." -- Lisa Lerner, author of Just Like Beauty "Flight is a wonderful first novel. It takes off with assurance. It climbs with lyrical beauty. It levels off above a colorful landscape of American weddings, wars, and wisdom. It lands, honest and funny and mature, at its final destination of both love and truth." -- Romulus Linney, author of Heathen Valley and Slowly, by Thy Hand Unfurled "Ginger Strand's book is a marvel, weaving its myriad threads into a dramatic, vivid whole. There's a momentum to this story, an emotional pull that reveals itself with grace and sophistication. Indeed, Flight introduces us to a masterful talent, a writer who pulls no punches in her depiction of marriage and family, what it means to grow older, to return home. Evocative in its rendering of small-town America, here is a moving portrayal of four distinct lives and their circumstances, a novel filled with wisdom, abundant in heart, uniquely perceptive to these qualities which bind us." -- Matthew Iribarne, author of Astronauts & Other Stories "Ginger Strand's Flight is a profound examination of American lives edged by wars, friendships, and strong family bonds, old-fashioned and new. A translucent and beautiful novel." -- Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool's Day