TURBULENCE

DAVID SZALAY

Cape, 136pp, £9.99

David Szalay’s Man-bookershortlisted first novel All That Man Is was ingeniously comprised of interlinked short stories. His most recent, Turbulence, also tells individual stories, each involving a flight, a glimpse into the life of an air traveller. In the Evening Standard, David Sexton thought it a fine follow-up to a masterpiece: ‘So the subject again is not just human displacement, separation and loneliness but mortality itself, the way things happen and then “nothing will ever be the same again”.

Turbulence, told so limpidly that it may seem quite slight, is a chilling achievement.’

Alex Preston in the Guardian also enjoyed the journey: ‘Szalay presents us with lives that are messy, stalked by the threat of disease or bankruptcy or domestic violence, lives in thrall to atavistic animal impulses yet suspended in hi-tech bubbles far above the earth.’

There were a couple of disappointed readers, however. Mika Ross Southall in the Times thought the prose ‘feels dashed-off and lacklustre’ and the book an unworthy successor to All that Man Is: ‘Szalay first wrote these stories for broadcast on BBC Radio 4. They make for an ambitious, realist and fascinating sequenced collection that often courts discomfort. But as stand-alone tales, they fall short.’ And in the Irish

Times, Rob Doyle also wondered if the book really lived up to expectations: ‘Deftness of portraiture and incisive writing make

Turbulence worth the time of day, but the best way to regard this book is as a stepping stone, an exercise to maintain authorial fitness between one major work and – let us hope – the next.’