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Turbulence

A Novel

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Turbulence

By: David Szalay
Narrated by: Gabra Zackman
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About this listen

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Flesh, a “masterful” (The Washington Post), “cathartic” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), novel about twelve people, mostly strangers, and the surprising ripple effect each one has on the life of the next as they cross paths while in transit around the world

In this “compelling” (The Christian Science Monitor), “crisp and clever” (Vanity Fair) novel, Szalay’s diverse protagonists circumnavigate the planet in twelve flights, from London to Madrid, from Dakar to Sao Paulo, to Toronto, to Delhi, to Doha, en route to see lovers or estranged siblings, aging parents, baby grandchildren, or nobody at all. Along the way, they experience the full range of human emotions from loneliness to love and, knowingly or otherwise, change each other in one brief, electrifying interaction after the next.

Written with magic and economy, “Szalay explores the miraculous ability of our shared humanity to lift us from loneliness” (Esquire) and delivers a dazzling portrait of the interconnectedness of the modern world.
Family Life Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

"If an audiobook clocks more miles per hour than David Szalay’s Turbulence, a novel whose brief running time belies its broad ambitions, I can’t think of what it might be. . . . [Narrator Gabra Zackman] reads with empathy and dexterity, shifting nationalities and gender countless times, often multiple times on the same page." (James Tate Hill)
"While only a small portion of this audiobook takes place on an airplane, each chapter is named for a 'departing' or 'arriving' airport code. This device--and even the choice of a single narrator for each essentially stand-alone story--reinforces the sense of a world simultaneously linked yet impersonally segmented. The novel is structured around the perspectives of a series of characters, each one of whom somehow touches upon the life of a previous character. Narrator Gabra Zackman performs like a seamless one-woman relay team. She hands off each transition--usually in both nationality and gender--to herself so cleanly that listeners will simultaneously experience both the continuity AND the shifting cadence of the story as it passes from one set of lives to another."
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