Landing Gear

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Sharp, engaging contemporary fiction from Governor General's Award winner Kate Pullinger, author of The Mistress of Nothing

A man falls from the sky and against all odds lands himself a new life.
Spring 2010. Harriet works in local radio in London, England. When a volcano explodes in Iceland and airspace shuts down over Europe stranding most of her colleagues abroad, she seizes the opportunity to change her working life. At the same time, Yacub, a migrant worker from Pakistan, is stranded in a labour camp in Dubai, an Emily, a young tv researcher, loses her father to a sudden heart attack. Michael, stuck in New York, travels to Toronto to stay with an old flame. And Jack, a teenager liberated from normal life by the absence of airplanes, takes an unexpected risk and finds himself in trouble.
Two years later, these lives collide dramatically when Yacub falls out of the landing gear of the airplane on which he is a stowaway and onto Harriet's car in a supermarket car park. Yacub's arrival in the lives of Harriet, Jack, Michael, and Emily catapults these characters into a series of life-changing events.
Based on a newspaper article Pullinger first read more than a decade ago, when the body of an airplane stowaway landed in a southwest London supermarket car park, Landing Gear explores what would happen if the stowaway survived, unscathed. From the ash cloud airspace shutdown in 2010, through 2012, and onto 2014, the novel is about the complex texture of modern life--airplanes, the internet, migrant labour, and the loneliness of the nuclear family.

KATE PULLINGER writes for both print and digital platforms. In 2009 her novel The Mistress of Nothing won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her prize-winning digital fiction projects Inanimate Alice and Flight Paths: A Networked Novel have reached audiences around the world. As well as The Mistress of Nothing, Pullinger’s books include A Little Stranger, Weird Sister, The Last Time I Saw Jane, Where Does Kissing End?, and When the Monster Dies, as well as the short story collections My Life as a Girl in a Men’s Prison and Tiny Lies. She co-wrote the novel of the film The Piano with director Jane Campion. Kate Pullinger was born in Cranbrook, British Columbia, and is currently a Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University. She is married and has two children. Find her at www.katepullinger.com.