Planes

Peter C. Baker, 1984-

Book - 2022

"An urgent, exciting, fiercely intelligent debut novel that goes deep inside the daily lives of two women-one in Rome, the other in North Carolina-to tell a story about the powerful interconnections, both personal and political, unseen and inexorable, that exist beneath the surface of our troubled world. 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 CIA black site where he is being detained. She moves as inconspicuously as possible through her modest life, doing her best to avoid the whispered curiosity of her community. Meanwhile, Mel-who thinks of herself as a lapsed activist-is trying to get the suburban conse...rvatives of her small North Carolina town to support her school board initiatives, and struggling to fill her empty nest. Her life is uneventful, except perhaps for the affair she can't quite 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 US government's extraordinary renditions-including that of Amira's husband-these two women's lives seem destined to collide. Written with piercing insight and artistry, Planes is a singular, assured, and indelible first novel that announces a major new voice"--

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Subjects
Genres
Thrillers (Fiction)
Novels
Published
New York, NY : Alfred A. Knopf 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Peter C. Baker, 1984- (author)
Physical Description
pages cm
ISBN
9780593320273
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Baker's beautifully written first novel connects quotidian and global issues through two women, Amira and Mel, living in different hemispheres. Amira is in Rome, and has converted to Islam to feel closer to her husband, Ayoub, who was being held in Morocco for unknown reasons for two years. Upon his release, he struggles to readjust. Amira has to balance helping him with navigating the claustrophobic attention of her well-intentioned adopted community while also serving as the breadwinner. Mel lives in a small North Carolina town. A former activist, she is now a compromising school board member who, though happily married, is nonetheless in a no-strings affair with her political opposite, Bradley, a confident right-wing lawyer. Her life is transformed when old friends inform Mel that a local company in her sleepy town is involved in extraordinary renditions, including the one that captured Ayoub. In a tale that unfurls like a thriller across these two narratives, Baker is subtly indignant about the entire neoconservative project. This assured debut is a timely reminder of the traumas caused by many post-9/11 policies.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Inspired by the North Carolina Stop Torture Now coalition, Baker's arresting debut charts the effects of rendition on an Italian Muslim convert and an American former anti-war activist. Amira, 32, feels like an outcast living in the small Rome apartment she once shared with her Moroccan husband, Ayoub, who was detained in Pakistan, then extradited and tortured for suspicion of unspecified crimes. When Ayoub returns after years of silence except for the redacted letters he sent to Amira, he is not the man Amira once knew, and though an American lawyer is working on his case, the future seems dubious for them both. Running alongside this narrative is the story of Melanie, a real estate agent in North Carolina who is cheating on her husband with Bradley, a member of the local school board. Bradley also happens to be the president of Atlantic Industries, a small Air America--style operation that stands accused of providing rendition flights. Now, Melanie becomes consumed with guilt over her hesitancy to help her old activist friends dig into Bradley's shadowy activities. Baker masterly juggles the two concurrent story lines, never losing the urgency of either as Amira and Melanie grapple with hard truths and seek justice and indemnification. Along the way, the author digs deep into the nuances of love, pain, betrayal, and the promise of deliverance. This moving debut buzzes with relevance. Agent: Chris Clemans, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Amira lives in Rome, where she spends her days trying to read the heavily redacted letters her husband sends from the Moroccan black site where he is imprisoned. Mel lives in suburban North Carolina, where she tries to get her conservative neighbors to support her far-reaching school board initiatives. Their stories come together when Mel discovers that a local charter airline is a CIA front serving various facilities, including the one holding Amira's husband. Baker's fiction and nonfiction pieces have appeared in multiple venues.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

This affecting debut examines the impact of rendition and torture in two different cultures. In one narrative thread, Amira, nee Maria, is an Italian woman married to Ayoub, a Moroccan who was seized by police two years ago while traveling in Pakistan, flown to a prison in his homeland, and apparently tortured, all without being charged. Amira, who changed her name and religion when she married, copes with loneliness, uncertainty, and feeling like an outsider to both Italians and Muslims. She depends on calls and emails from a U.S. lawyer working on such cases and on heavily redacted letters from Ayoub. When he's released, he is thin, anxious, barely able to eat or work or spend time close to Amira. Meanwhile, in a town near Raleigh, North Carolina, Melanie is a real estate agent whose college-age son discovers her extramarital affair with a fellow school board official. Around the same time, roughly 2005, a couple Mel and her husband have known since they were all college activists want help mounting a campaign against a small airline in Mel's town that is being used for rendition flights. Mel hesitates because her lover is the airline's president. Baker, a Chicago-based writer, alternates chapters mainly between the two women, and the resulting diptych is inescapably unbalanced. Mel's troubles can seem almost comically petty compared with Amira's. That may be unavoidable, but it's compounded by the fact that the North Carolina activists had nothing to do with Ayoub's release. Don't read those as flaws. In the real world, too, activism depends on preoccupied, ambivalent people like Mel and sometimes doesn't seem to make a difference. And sometimes it does. An author's note says the book was partly inspired by the work of North Carolina Stop Torture Now. A thoughtful look at the small-scale fallout of an international issue. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Amira On Tuesday, after she's walked for hours, she decides to sit at a coffee bar and order a cappuccino in her husband's honor. On one of their earliest dates, the third or fourth, he took her to the Appian Way Park, the Tor Marancia section. During the bus ride, and even more so once they arrived, he was visibly proud to be showing her--a native Italian--a piece of Rome she didn't know. Afterward, they sat in a charming nearby coffee bar with outdoor seating. Even though it was already late afternoon, Ayoub ordered a cappuccino. When the waiter sniggered, she felt a mix of pity and embarrassment. But Ayoub wasn't bothered. He couldn't help it, he explained, he loved cappuccino too much to limit himself to having it only in the morning, the way "real Italians" did. "They can call me a dumb Arab if they want," he said. "They can laugh. But I know I'm a dumb Arab with a delicious drink. Sorry if I embarrassed you, though." "No," she said. "Not embarrassed." Saying the words made them true. She called the waiter back and changed her order to a cappuccino. From then on, late-in-the-day cappuccinos were one of their rituals. At the coffee bar by the Appian Way Park, they became friendly with the owner, who cheered them on. "Maybe you Arabs could teach us something about being Italian," he said. "If everyone was like you, I could sell cappuccino all day and make more money." Arabs . Plural. They never corrected him, opting instead to smile softly at each other and enjoy the moment. Now each cappuccino she drinks alone is money she could be putting away toward rent. She knows that. But she needs to keep the ritual alive. She's walking home when her phone starts to vibrate in her purse. SARAH LAWYER OFFICE. It takes her more than one try to accept the call, her hands are shaking, she keeps missing the button. They have a system. Sarah uses it with many of her clients. For most updates, she uses email. If she has information that is not urgent but, for whatever reason, cannot go in an email, she sends an email or text proposing three possible times for a call. She makes unscheduled calls only if she has truly urgent news, news she knows Amira needs to hear right away. The threshold for needs to hear right away has never been defined, and Sarah has crossed it only twice. The first time was to tell her that Ayoub seemed to no longer be in Pakistan--but that no one knew where he was, or why. The second time was two weeks later, to tell her that, apparently, he'd been held by the Pakistani secret police but was now almost definitely in Morocco. It was in this conversation that Amira first heard the words Temara Prison . Until then, she'd thought it most likely he was lying in a hospital where for some reason they couldn't identify him, maybe his wallet had been thrown from his body in a car crash and he wasn't yet conscious. Sarah's system is supposed to save her clients stress by reducing the number of times they have to hold a ringing phone in their hands, suffocating under the weight of every terrible thing they might be about to learn, all the possibilities they cannot help having read about in the newspapers or online, plus all the permutations of those possibilities their minds can't help generating. The system is also supposed to make it less stressful to check (or not check) email: one can always know that if it's something truly urgent, Sarah will already have called. She leans against a lamppost. Whatever she is about to learn, dozens of people walking down the street will witness her learning it. "Hello, Khadija?" It's Sarah, but for some reason she's speaking English. "Excuse me?" "Khadija, can you hear me? It's Sarah." "No, this is Amira." "Amira? Oh God, I'm--" "What is it? What happened?" "No, nothing, Amira." She switches to her broken Italian. "It is a nothing. I'm sorry. I call the wrong number. I mean to be calling someone else. I am sorry, so sorry, very extra sorry. There is no information that is new. I am so sorry. I am... tired. I make a mistake. I am sorry." "Oh." The sickening chemical collision of relief and panic in the gut. "I am tired and I call the bad number. The not-right number." "That's okay. It's okay, Sarah. Khadija is... another client? The wife of another client, I mean?" Sarah sighs. "Yes, the wife of a client." On the way home she cannot stop herself from going into the Somali internet cafe and googling: Khadija rendition wife, Khadija rendition Sarah Mayfield, Khadija CIA rendition, Khadija Guantanamo, Khadija husband Guantanamo, Khadija husband Temara . She finds nothing--nothing she hasn't seen before, nothing specific to Khadija, whoever she is. She should stop but she doesn't: Ayoub Alami, Ayoub Alami Temara, Arsalan Pakistan prison, Arsalan CIA detained . And so on. Until she can't bear it. She has an email from Mourad, Ayoub's best friend from childhood, asking the same questions he always asks in his emails: if there is any news, if there is anything he can do, if she needs money (though he never puts it so directly), if she wants to come and stay with his family in Madrid, for any amount of time. I know Ayoub would do anything for me, and I will do anything for him . Excerpted from Planes: A Novel by Peter C. Baker All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.