Flight
A Novel
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
From the National Book Award–winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the tale of a troubled boy's trip through history.
Half Native American and half Irish, fifteen-year-old "Zits" has spent much of his short life alternately abused and ignored as an orphan and ward of the foster care system. Ever since his mother died, he's felt alienated from everyone, but, thanks to the alcoholic father whom he's never met, especially disconnected from other Indians.
After he runs away from his latest foster home, he makes a new friend. Handsome, charismatic, and eloquent, Justice soon persuades Zits to unleash his pain and anger on the uncaring world. But picking up a gun leads Zits on an unexpected time-traveling journey through several violent moments in American history, experiencing life as an FBI agent during the civil rights movement, a mute Indian boy during the Battle of Little Bighorn, a nineteenth-century Indian tracker, and a modern-day airplane pilot. When Zits finally returns to his own body, "he begins to understand what it means to be the hero, the villain and the victim. . . . Mr. Alexie succeeds yet again with his ability to pierce to the heart of matters, leaving this reader with tears in her eyes" (The New York Times Book Review).
Sherman Alexie's acclaimed novels have turned a spotlight on the unique experiences of modern-day Native Americans, and here, the New York Times–bestselling author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian takes a bold new turn, combining magical realism with his singular humor and insight.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Sherman Alexie including rare photos from the author's personal collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A deadpan "Call Me Zits" opens the first novel in 10 years from Alexie ("Smoke Signals", etc.), narrated by a self-described "time-traveling mass murderer" whose name and deeds unravel as this captivating bildungsroman progresses. Half-Indian, half-Irish, acne-beset Zits is 15: he never knew his alcoholic father; his mother died when he was six; his aunt kicked him out when he was 10 (after he set her sleeping boyfriend on fire because the boyfriend had been forcing Zits to have sex). Running away from his 20th foster home, Zits ends up, briefly, in jail; soon after, he enters a bank, shoots several people and is shot dead himself. Zits then commences time-traveling via the bodies of others, finding himself variously lodged in an FBI agent in the '70s (helping to assassinate radical Indian activists); a mute Indian boy at the Battle of Little Big Horn; an Indian tracker named Gus; an airplane pilot instructor (one of whose pupils commits a terrorist act); and his own father. Zits eventually comes back to himself and to an unexpected redemption. While the plot is wisp-thin, one quickly surrenders to Zits's voice, which elegantly mixes free-floating young adult cynicism with a charged, idiosyncratic view of American history. Alexie plunges the book into bracing depths. "" .
