Flight

It’s December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help.

With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as “a defining novel of our age” (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps. Flight is a novel of family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, one that forms a powerful next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time.

This discussion guide was written by Harper Collins.

Book club questions for Flight by Lynn Steger Strong

Use these discussion questions to guide your next book club meeting.

How are each couple’s wishes for Helen’s house influenced by their social class status and role as parents?

What is the significance of Kate being unofficially tasked with maintaining her mother’s traditions such as setting New Year’s resolutions on December 21st? How does this task relate to her role within their family?

How is the theme of home explored throughout Flight? Is it strictly tied to a physical space? How do the characters conceptualize home differently?

Kate and Tess consistently cast judgements on the other’s parenting and life choices. How does their conversation during the search for Maddie illustrate their different embodiments of motherhood and womanhood? Do they eventually come to respect each other, or do they continue to harbor silent judgments?

Tess, coming from a distant and cold family, finds comfort in being welcomed under Helen’s wing. She eventually realizes “that living with lack does not prepare you for loss. Lack is an amorphous murk, difficult, unpleasant, but loss weighs more, has a shape and texture all its own” (48). How does the author explore the differences between lack and loss? What are these differences?

The central role of family in one’s life is a key theme in this novel. How is family defined? How does it transform and expand for each character as the novel progresses?

How is Alice’s complicated relationship with motherhood explored through her connection to Maddie? How does she understand her role in Quinn and Maddie’s family?

How are starkly different parenting styles characterized throughout the novel? How do the kids reflect or reject their parents’ influences?

What did you make of the men’s eagerness to devise a thought-out plan to search for Maddie? How do Martin, Josh, and Henry each express their masculinity in distinct ways?

The two sets of parents, Tess and Martin, and Kate and Josh, have different approaches to sharing domestic labor among themselves. How do Josh’s and Tess’s views on domestic work shape their relationships with their partners?

Henry spends much of the novel preoccupied with perfecting his bird artwork. How does the motif of birds evolve throughout? Was he satisfied by the reveal at the very end?

Flight Book Club Questions PDF

Click here for a printable PDF of the Flight discussion questions

"Arresting and powerful, Flight examines the possibility and pain of fierce love and hope in our time of looming existential threats.” — Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers

"Suspenseful, dazzling and moving.” — Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind