About this ebook
Suburban housewife Harriet spends her days doing what she’s worst at. Formerly a local radio host, now she grocery shops for her family who has too much to eat, parents a son who refuses to communicate with her, and tries to be a wife to a man who hasn’t embraced her in years. But what starts out as a mundane trip to the supermarket turns her world upside down when a mysterious man named Yacub falls out of the sky from the landing gear of an airplane and lands on her car in the parking lot—and survives. He’s starving and he’s freezing cold. What can she do but bring him home to her family?
Suddenly her son has stepped away from the video games and her husband is looking at her once again—even if it’s because they think she’s crazy for taking in a complete stranger stinking of petrol. And who is Yacub, this young man who escaped from a Dubai labor camp and stowed away in the belly of the plane to travel around the world? And is it a coincidence that he’s dropped into Harriet’s life just at the moment when a long-buried secret from her past threatens to come to light?
Inspired by real-life accounts of airplane stowaways, Landing Gear is a highly imaginative story of colliding worlds and extraordinary connections in an age where we may have the world at the touch of a screen, but might need some help seeing what’s right in front of us.
PRAISE FOR LANDING GEAR:
"An extraordinary idea, brilliantly executed" Viv Groskop, Red Magazine
“Landing Gear is a beautiful and profound story about finding love, peace and meaning in a too-busy world.” Quill and Quire (starred review)
"Pullinger's empathy for the characters makes them hugely likable, even the truculent streak of adolescence that is Jack" Alfred Hickling, Guardian
"A portrait of a modern nuclear family - explosive, searing - Landing Gear is truly a novel for our brave new world" Merilyn Simonds, author of Convict Lover
"A wonderful novel, a novel of secrets - each carefully and cleverly revealed, all abetting a propulsive storyline that offers up starting revelations to the very end. This is the work of a writer at the top of her game, and I absolutely loved it." Craig Davidson, author of Cataract City
"Innovative, enthralling, kinetic and often subversively funny. Alongside Landing Gear's stowaway, Yacub, we freefall and rip a hole right through modern society's illusions of any shared comfort zone. I loved the headlong rush, the imperiled tenderness" Kathleen Winter, author of Annabel
"A turbulent and exhilarating ride through modern family relationships, our cultural divide and the unexpected things that come crashing into our lives" Brian Francis, author of Natural Order
"Pulliinger's exquisite writing draws us into a world in which character negotiate between the probable and the all-but-impossible. 'How can they survive this?' we ask ourselves, and then it hits us: we all do." Wayne Grady, author of Emancipation Day
About the author
Kate Pullinger is an award-winning writer of novels, short stories and digital works. She is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University and also acts as a mentor to new and emerging writers.
Born in Cranbrook, British Columbia, Kate dropped out of McGill University after a year and a half of not studying philosophy and literature. She then spent a year working in a copper mind in the Yukon where she crushed rocks and saved money. She spent that money travelling and ended up in London, England, where she lives with her husband and two children.
Kate's novels include The Mistress of Nothing, winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, A Little Stranger and The Last Time I Saw Jane, as well as the ghost tale, Weird Sister, and the erotic feminist vampire novel Where Does Kissing End? Her new novel, Landing Gear, will be published in Spring 2014.
Kate's digital works include Inanimate Alice, an episodic online multimedia novel and Flight Paths: A Networked Novel.
You can find out more about Kate and her work at www.katepullinger.com
