Planes

A Novel

By: Peter C. Baker

Narrated by: Lameece Issaq

Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins

Publisher's summary

A CHICAGO TRIBUNE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An urgent, fiercely intelligent debut novel about "two couples, an ocean apart—one wounded by a war crime, the other just starting to reckon with being implicated in it.... An insightful book about the slow, zigzag work of healing that nonetheless moves at the speed of a thriller" (Caleb Crain, author of Necessary Errors).

For years, Amira—a recent convert to Islam living in Rome—has gone to work, said her prayers, and struggled to piece together her husband’s redacted letters from the Moroccan black site where he is imprisoned. She moves as inconspicuously as possible through her modest life, doing her best to avoid the whispered curiosity of her community.

Meanwhile, Mel—once an activist—is trying to get the suburban conservatives of her small North Carolina town to support her school board initiatives, and struggles to fill her empty nest. It's a steady, settled life, except perhaps for the affair she can't admit she's having.

As these narratives unfurl thousands of miles apart, they begin to resonate like the two sides of a tuning fork. And when Mel learns that a local charter airline serves as a front for the CIA’s extraordinary renditions—including that of Amira's husband—both women face wrenching questions that will shape the rest of their lives.

Written with piercing insight and artistry, Planes is a singular, assured, and indelible first novel that announces a major new voice.

©2022 Knopf (P)2022 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Planes reads like vintage Don DeLillo at his most thoughtful.”—Chicago Tribune

"Subtle and unsettling."—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Peter C. Baker delicately crafts the internal lives of these very different people . . . The debate continues over whether imagining the other—writing outside one’s identity with respect and empathy—actually works in fiction. We live in a moment of great reckoning. Amira is an interesting contribution to the conversation. The specificity of her Esquilino neighborhood, her nervous lunches with an old flame, her satisfaction in practicing Islam had me turning the book over to look at the author’s name and wonder, How does this Baker know what it is like to be Amira? . . . Her determinations, the way she manages their stings and rewards, capture our shared human ache with stunning accuracy. I felt for her the immediate empathy one feels for a well-written character, and it is clear that Baker did, too.”—Laleh Khadivi, New York Times Book Review