There’s nothing like diving into a good book while flying from A to B, and with long-haul plane travel set to creep back into our lives (yahoo!), we look at what pax on board are reading.
Atomic Habits
James Clear
People think that when you want to change your life, you need to think big. But world-renowned habits expert James Clear has discovered another way. He knows that real change comes from the compound effect of hundreds of small decisions like doing two push-ups a day or waking five minutes early. He calls them ‘atomic habits’. In this ground-breaking book, Clears reveals how minuscule changes can grow into life-altering outcomes.
Harlem Shuffle
Colson Whitehead
From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Underground Railroad, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s. “Ray Carney was only slightly bent when it came to being crooked…” To his customers and neighbours, Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. Few know he descends from a line of hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy is full of cracks that grow with time.
Violeta
Isabel Allende
Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family with five boisterous sons. Her life is marked by extraordinary events – the ripples of the Great War are still being felt as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth. She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves, recounting devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, poverty and wealth, loss and joy; her life shaped by monumental moments in history: the fight for women’s rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and not one, but two pandemics.
The Island Of Missing Trees
Elif Shafak
Cyprus, 1974. Two teenagers, Kostas, who is Greek Christian, and Defne, a Muslim Turk, regularly meet in secret at a tavern through whose roof grows a fig tree. The tree remains when war breaks out and the city is reduced to rubble. The teenagers vanish and break apart. Decades later, in north London, 16-year-old Ada Kazantzakis has never visited the island where her parents were born. Desperate for answers, she seeks to untangle secrets, separation, and silence. Her only connection to the land of her ancestors is a fig tree growing in the back garden of their home.
