Flying at night

About this book

"An emotionally charged novel about family -- the slow accumulation of wrongs that drive us apart and the unlikely paths that lead us home again. Piper Hart has poured all her energy into raising her son, Fred, while her often-absent husband, Isaac, has poured all his energy into a career defending the wrongly accused. She's always told herself her son is perfectly normal, but somewhere deep inside her rests a tiny suspicion that all is not well. Her whole world is leveled when her son is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Nine-year-old Fred has just traded in a fascination with airplanes for the gruesome details of World War II, which he knows by heart. But besides his mother and his grandfather's border collie, Chuck Yeager, Fred is an island. Lance "the Silver Eagle" Whitman is Piper's father, a national hero, and a raging narcissist. A heart attack leaves Lance in a coma, but, much to his family's distress, he doesn't die. When Lance wakes up with a traumatic brain injury, his wife decides that after a lifetime of emotional and verbal abuse, she is walking away, and Piper must decide what will become of her once-proud tyrant of a father. Piper chooses to bring him home, where both Fred and Lance, misunderstood by the world around them, begin to connect"--