Luminous Airplanes

A novel of intelligence, humour and wonder. In September 2000, a young programmer comes home from a festival in the Nevada desert and learns that his grandfather has died. He has to return to the upstate New York town where he spent his childhood summers in order to clean out his house; while there he runs into Yesim, a Turkish American woman he fell in love with as a child, and begins a romance in which past and present are dangerously confused. At the same time, his thoughts move from his upbringing at the hands of his two artist mothers (the twins Marie Celeste and Celeste Marie), to San Francisco in the years of the Internet boom, to Richard Ente, the father he only knows through the words and stories his mothers have let slip over the years. Nearly ten years in the making, Luminous Airplanes is a novel of intelligence, humour and wonder, that considers large histories and small ones, grief, love, memory, family - and flying machines.