A missing child brings an affluent New York family face-to-face with harsher realities at Yuletide
The Christmas novel may be big business for publishers of commercial fiction but it has a place on literary lists, too, from that schmaltzy ur-text A Christmas Carol to Jonathan Franzen’s pathos-heavy The Corrections and Claire Keegan’s knockout Small Things Like These.
With her third novel, Flight, Lynn Steger Strong makes her own quiet contribution, in which she questions that cornerstone of secular yuletide celebrations: collectivity. Consoling and unsettling in equal measure, it opens as three grown children converge for their first festive get-together since their mother Helen’s death. She was traditionally the one who corralled everyone, smoothing over tensions, making sure the annual photograph got taken, smiles fixed in place.
Flight by Lynn Steger Strong is published by Scribner (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
