I really enjoyed this story of 12 people whose lives connect each other on a flight. It shows you how closely we are connected in this world.

Every once in a while a quiet, little book comes along that totally steals my heart. I have completely fallen in love with this tiny book that I consumed quickly in less than two hours. These linked short stories capture brief, but significant moments in people's lives that reside all over the globe. There was so much heart and passion in each story and the characters were diverse but still incredibly authentic. I felt like I got to take a quick trip into their lives (and all around the world) through Szalay's writing. I wish there had been more buzz for this book when it came out but maybe more positive reviews like this one will inspire some people to pick it up. It's magic!

The world really is a village, a concept brought home in this slim volume. There are 12 chapters, each featuring a different person who is traveling on a flight to a different city. Their stories overlap, with each character suffering a crises and somehow connected to a character in the previous chapter. By the end, the reader has traversed the globe and the story comes full circle.

What a brilliant structure for a book and a beautiful example of the interconnectedness of all of humanity. Despite our differences every life has its shares of turbulence.

The stories are so brief there isn’t much character development, but they give us a glimpse into these 12 lives and provides us with food for thought.

This book is a series of vignettes linked together by a gimmicky structure. From the blurb I expected the book to reflect how a single event (turbulence on a plane) reverberates through the lives of various characters. That is not this book. Each chapter of the book is basically about two characters and one of those characters travels to another city at the end of the chapter, beginning and ending with London. The characters were clearly etched and the book held my interest, but nothing profound happened. It was definitely not “a wondrous, profoundly moving novel”. The book was just ok for me, but I would be willing to read more by this author. 3.5 stars.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

Quick but meaningful and thought provoking read about how the lives of seemingly complete strangers intersect. I finished this book in one sitting but I love how all the characters’ stories connected with each other, and how each character’s chapter left me wanting more.

This overlapping and thematically connected short story collection was really fascinating! What worked really well for me was the linearity we followed in terms of the flight paths, and how connection were made between the stories so the reader felt a sense of flow that way. I also loved the geographic reach and range of perspectives (intersecting with different genders, classes, professions etc), and found myself particularly moved by the initial few stories in the collection. A short but impactful read that is well worth checking out!

This book has an interesting premise -- passengers stranded between, during, before, or after flights. The 12 stories are all linked in interesting ways too. Szalay's prose is engaging and pulls us along as we want to know "what happens next." The world he creates is richly complex, crisis-driven, and interconnected in many different ways. This is a collection that anyone who loves the short story form should read.

3.5 for sure. This is probably one of the most uniquely plotted and structured book ideas I've ever encountered. The story starts in the life of one person, who interacts with someone else on the plane, who then becomes the subject of the next chapter, and so on. It's just a continuous linear experience from one person to the next, and all of the turbulence that they're experiencing in their own lives. If you have to have fully fleshed out characters and plotlines, this is not the book for you, but if you're happy to dip down into someone else's life from a 10,000 foot view, this book delivers and then some. Very short, intense, and interesting read.

The story and connections aren't immersive enough for you to care about either the story or characters or what happens to them.

This book is a string of vignettes based on airplane travel. In each vignette, a character from the previous vignette becomes the main story. The book begins with a woman flying to see her daughter. As the plane hits rough air, she has an encounter with the man sitting next to her, and he becomes the protagonist in the next chapter, and so on. Beautifully written, TURBULENCE captures those small stories that illustarte what it means to be human and alive.

A quick, easy read that kept my interest so much that I finished it in one sitting! I know it’s not terribly long, but that’s still a feat for me. I always love stories that connect us without us ever knowing.

I normally go out of my way to avoid reading short story collections, and on the surface that is exactly what David Szalay's latest novel is. Turbulence is a collection of stories about different people who have nothing in common with each other. Except, the brilliance of Turbulence is how Mr. Szalay highlights the invisible strings that connect the characters to each other. Not only do these links enforce the connectivity of each and every one of us, but they also help to flesh out the characters and provide us insight with little exposition. These links also remind us that a person may appear one way on the surface but has an entire unknown lifetime of worries, doubts, fears, sorrows, and happiness happening internally and that there is a danger in making assumptions. Mr. Szalay's writing is gorgeous and masterful, adding depth to characters and stories in a few simple words. He brings the characters to life in a way not typically seen in short stories, which is why I avoid them. However, give me something like Turbulence, with its connected vignettes because I love seeing those ties that bind. Done well, as is Turbulence, it can be a profound reading experience.

Turbulence is a mix of 12 short stories. Each story has a new character, a new story line and then they end up connecting to form a full circle.

This book is only 160 pages and felt incomplete. I was left wanting to know more and to connect to characters and while this may have been the purpose of the writer it just left me frustrated. This doesn't mean that it isn't a good read because it is - it just means that the reader is left feeling uncertain about the story and characters.



* I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

David Szalay has created a moving novel that shows the universality of human emotions. With these lightly connected stories set in chapters titled by the departure and destinations of flights taken by his protagonists he has flown us around the world and given us an opportunity to catch a glimpse of shared emotions. I thought this was a wonderful book; so much packed into such a spare novel.

Szalay’s twelve short vignettes circle around the globe via plane and airport codes featuring people who are all experiencing some sort of turbulence in their lives. Each chapter is told from the perspective of different characters who shares different difficulties. The writing style is very real, as are the struggles

The only downside of this is the lack of closure for each character or chapter, which I assume, is the point.

This is a short story or novella written from the perspectives of a collection of different characters who share different difficulties. Each character that we are introduced to has a connection to the preceding character in the previous chapter, and they all seem to share a link through their travels through different airports. While our introductions to each character are very short, the writing style is very real and the struggles seem very real. There are echoes in the stories of just how small our world is. Perhaps the only downside is that we kind of miss a sense of closure for each character we meet as we move on to the next character so quickly, and the novel does end somewhat abruptly. This is a very quick read. I finished it in a few hours. A recommended read for fans of the short story genre.

I loved the structure of this book of interconnected stories, linked by chance meetings between passengers on flights who keeping moving the novel along with them as they travel around the world. A woman who had been visiting her son in London flies back to her home in Madrid in the chapter entitled LGW-MAD after the airport codes for the flight. In the next chapter, MAD-DSS (Madrid to Dakar), her seat mate from that first flight is being chauffeured home from the airport by a driver who can’t bring himself to report some horrible news. That horrible news becomes more clear in Chapter 3, which takes us from Dakar to São Paulo, as a pilot trying to get to the airport for his flight to Brazil witnesses his taxi get involved in a terrible accident. And so on around the world until the novel eventually ends up with a flight back to London Gatwick. Along the way, Szalay introduces the reader to characters from different cultures and economic backgrounds, telling their stories in clean, clear prose. I hadn’t read any of David Szalay’s books before now but based on “Turbulence” will definitely be reading his backlist. Recommended.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.

I loved the way that the 12 short stories, or vignettes, in Szalay's Turbulence, were all interconnected. This is a short, but powerful, look at human relationships - we never know the impact we can have on the people that we meet, or the ways that we could be peripherally connected. This novel really takes the idea of "6 degrees of separation" and runs with it.

I wouldn't consider this anything life changing, but the concept was so intriguing to me, and the execution so well done, that I am inclined to rate it high and recommend it to fans of literary fiction or books about humanity and human relationships.

Each of the short vignettes in “Turbulence” is engaging and well-written. They are written in the form of an air voyage with each story linking to the next via its destination and arrival cities. Ultimately, though, I missed the larger meta-story of the book. It wasn’t clear to me what tied them together beyond the almost coincidental meetings of the characters.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Published by Scribner on July 16, 2019

A woman who becomes ill on a flight from London to Madrid hopes that the life of a man who has cancer will be spared in exchange for her death. A man sitting next to her spills a Coke on his trousers. From Madrid, that man flies home to Dakar. After witnessing the death of a child in a traffic accident, a pilot flies from Dakar to São Paulo, wondering whether his girlfriend in Frankfurt is alone.

Turbulence is a series of connected stories, each beginning with a flight from the city in which the preceding story was set and taking place in the destination city. As the characters jet from one city to another, they encounter the turbulence of life. A mother does not know how to respond when her daughter’s baby is born blind. A married senior tells her husband that she is in love with another man, causing their life to proceed “outwardly as normal for a while after that, though with a kind of silence at the heart of it.” A debt between friends sparks an argument, although the lender’s anger can be traced to an unrelated circumstance described in an earlier story. A woman’s husband flies home to abuse her, then flies back to Qatar where he is living a secret life.

The story about the married woman in her sixties who has an affair is my favorite. She loved her husband intensely once and knows that the intense love she feels for the new man will fade, just as her intense love for her husband did, but she surrenders to it anyway. Falling in love again somehow makes her marriage seem untrue, and she “did not want to live with something untrue.” The question is whether she should abandon her husband or work with him to restore truth to their marriage.

The novel is one of relentless motion; the stories are fleeting. Taken together, the overlapping chapters illustrate how people around the world make connections with each other, sometimes unnoticed or quickly forgotten as they move on to their next destination. The novel also emphasizes the similarities of people around the world. A troubled marriage in India echoes another in Hong Kong. Tensions between a parent and child in Budapest echo a relationship in Madrid. The man who lives multiple lives in India and Qatar sparks concern that a man who is about to marry in Budapest has another life in Syria.

David Szalay writes with surgical precision about the darkness that so often betrays the better self. Most books about connections focus on love, childbirth, and the other joys that bind humanity. Yet it is also true that humans everywhere face the same fears and burdens: death, duplicity, the exposure of embarrassing secrets. Turbulence is not a life-affirming novel — its bleakness may put off some readers — but Szalay offers an honest glimpse of the trauma and despair that people of all social classes, races, ages, and nationalities share in all parts of the world.

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