Luminous Airplanes

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

A decade after the publication of Haussmann, or the Distinction, his acclaimed novel about nineteenth-century Paris, Paul La Farge turns his imagination to America at the dawn of the twenty-first century in Luminous Airplanes.


In September 2000, a young computer programmer comes home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died. He must return to Thebes, a town so isolated that its inhabitants have their own language, and clean out the house where his family has lived for five generations. While he's there, he remembers San Francisco in the wild years of the Internet boom, and begins an ill-advised romance in which past and present are dangerously confused.

La Farge's Luminous Airplanes is an expansive, hugely imaginative, and very funny novel about history, love, memory, family, flying machines, dance music, and the end of the world.