Landing

Categories: Romance , Fiction , Gay & Lesbian

Smalltown Canadian girl meets cosmopolitan Dublin girl in Emma Donoghue's long-distance love story Landing. 

 

Jude is flying to London to bring her dying mother home.  Sile is the airline hostess on the flight.  Despite the circumstances and the complicated relationships they both are already involved in, they're attracted to each other. 

 

 

It’s impossible, of course.  Jude has hardly ever been out of spitting distance of her tiny town, where she is a museum curator.  Sile is in a settled relationship, is part of Dublin’s vibrant twenty-first-century urban scene, and knows from her own Anglo-Indian heritage how complicated long-distance, cross-cultural romance can be.

 

But they make tentative contact again a few weeks later.  A romance of emails, phone calls, and all-too-infrequent visits ensues.  Something will have to give, though, as both of them know, if they’re to have a real relationship.

Donoghue balances the will-they, won’t-they romance through several vicissitudes and builds up a sympathetic portrait of both of her characters.  The interested friends and families observing the romance at both ends are also engagingly drawn.  As in last week's book, Late Nights on Air, the setting in a little Canadian town (600 souls) is part of the appeal, too.