Book Description
Beautiful first novel in the tradition of Tim Pears and Tim Binding
Product Description
1957, a hot August bank holiday, an airshow in a northern English city: Blaise, a French stunt airman, prepares to leap from a Dakota on balsa-wood wings of his own construction. Among the thousands waiting below on the ground are the members of Cissie Conolly's troubled family. She has reached a crisis in her life: she wants to open a flower shop; her husband Joe has escaped into drink; her sister, Lydia, harbours deep suspicions about Cissie's instinctive understanding with Captain Jack, Lydia's elderly husband. Meanwhile Cissie's 7-year-old son, Graham, sulks in his back garden, left at home with the boozy, restless Joe, while Captain Jack, blind and dying, is allowed to go to the airshow with the boy's mother and aunt. Graham has not seen his mother for twenty years but in the early nineties he returns to the northern city to work as a hotel chef and he and his mother are brought to face, in their own ways, the enormous secret that has shaped their whole lives.
From the Publisher
A brilliant debut by a writer who's paid his dues
As you can see from the cover if you click on it, Jim Crace has a high opinion of this novel: 'Alan Mahar's Flight Patterns is wonderful; he is a writer of substance, patience and real flair.' I share that opinion. It's a novel that carefully and unflashily gives you a real sense of the tensions that can affect a perfectly ordinary family as they go about their lives. It's not a 'family saga' that doggedly makes its way through decade after decade - it is set in the 1950s and 1990s, and the narrative jumps between the two decades, and in the process the author's deft touch give the reader a very real sense of the flavour of these two decades without overloading the period detail. It's a very 'English' novel, which makes no concessions to transatlantic style - an outstandingly satisfying read.
As you can see from the cover if you click on it, Jim Crace has a high opinion of this novel: 'Alan Mahar's Flight Patterns is wonderful; he is a writer of substance, patience and real flair.' I share that opinion. It's a novel that carefully and unflashily gives you a real sense of the tensions that can affect a perfectly ordinary family as they go about their lives. It's not a 'family saga' that doggedly makes its way through decade after decade - it is set in the 1950s and 1990s, and the narrative jumps between the two decades, and in the process the author's deft touch give the reader a very real sense of the flavour of these two decades without overloading the period detail. It's a very 'English' novel, which makes no concessions to transatlantic style - an outstandingly satisfying read.
