Flight

Description

The hilarious and tragic portrait of an orphaned Indian boy who travels back and forth through time in a charged search for his true identity. Flight follows this troubled foster teenager - a boy who is not a 'legal' Indian because he was never claimed by his father - as he learns that violence is not the answer. The journey for Flight's young hero begins as he's about to commit a massive act of violence. At the moment of the decision, he finds himself shot back through time to resurface in the body of an FBI agent during the civil rights era, where he sees why 'Hell is Red River, Idaho, in the 1970s'. Red River is only the first stop in an eye-opening trip through moments in American history. He will continue travelling back to inhabit the body of an Indian child during the battle at Little Bighorn and then ride with an Indian tracker in the nineteenth century before materialising as an airline pilot jetting through the skies today. During these travels through time, his refrain grows- 'Who's to judge?' This novel seeks nothing less than an understanding of why human beings hate. Flight is irrepressible and fearless - Sherman Alexie at his most brilliant.

Sherman Alexie is the author of Reservation Blues, Indian Killer, The Toughest Indian in the World, and Ten Little Indians. He wrote and directed The Business of Fancy-dancing and also wrote the award-winning screenplay for Smoke Signals, a film based on his short-story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. He has been nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the American Book Award.

Mr. Alexie manages to move effortlessly in and out of centuries like a person moving between waking and sleep... Right up to the novel's final sentence, Mr. Alexie succeeds yet again with his ability to pierce to the heart of matters, leaving this reader with tears in her eyes * New York Times * A funny, irreverent, sardonic but sentimental, rebellious voice set beside his elder...contemporaries...Alexie is the bad boy among them, mocking, self-mocking, unpredictable, unassimilable, reminding us of the young Philip Roth -- Joyce Carol Oates * New York Review of Books *