In Flight

Richard Stirling is a young English academic living in Nashville, Tennessee. Although he enjoys his work, his wife Anna is less keen on the American way of life than he is, and when the possibility of a post at Bristol University comes up, he decides to return to England, taking the opportunity to see his brother Edward and his wife Kate. But Richard's world is soon upset. A chance meeting in the hospital where Edward works brings him into contact with Derek, a young boy ill with leukaemia; at a dinner party given by his brother he meets Jane O'Neill, as uncertain and in need of love as the sick child. The demands of these new friendships soon take their toll and Richard finds that his whole concept of life is being called into question. Remorselessly he becomes obsessed with making unmanageable comparisons, with his job, his wife in Tennessee, his brother, his brother's wife, the small boy in hospital, Jane ... how do you get things right? Excited and disturbed, instead of going home, Richard stays on. And in the Nashville heatwave Anna goes on waiting, waiting for the news she so desperately wants to hear. And then one day she decides to wait no more. With an insight that is both sensitive and precise Jonathan Smith explores the feelings of lives intensely lived, examining the fate of people who see the gap between the oasis and the earth below, people, who in searching for something, may lose themselves.