Landing gear
Spring 2010. Harriet works in local radio in London, England. When a volcano explodes in Iceland and airspace shuts down over Europe stranding most of her colleagues abroad, she seizes the opportunity to change her working life. At the same time, Yacub, a migrant worker from Pakistan, is stranded in a labour camp in Dubai, an Emily, a young tv researcher, loses her father to a sudden heart attack. Michael, stuck in New York, travels to Toronto to stay with an old flame. And Jack, a teenager liberated from normal life by the absence of airplanes, takes an unexpected risk and finds himself in trouble. Two years later, these lives collide dramatically when Yacub falls out of the landing gear of the airplane on which he is a stowaway and onto Harriet's car in a supermarket car park. Yacub's arrival in the lives of Harriet, Jack, Michael, and Emily catapults these characters into a series of life-changing events. Based on a newspaper article Pullinger first read more than a decade ago, when the body of an airplane stowaway landed in a southwest London supermarket car park, Landing Gearexplores what would happen if the stowaway survived, unscathed. From the ash cloud airspace shutdown in 2010, through 2012, and onto 2014, the novel is about the complex texture of modern life--airplanes, the internet, migrant labour, and the loneliness of the nuclear family.