Book review: Flight

‘Flight’ is the perfect metaphor for Frawley’s new-breed globalizing Irish emigrés and immigrés. Like everything about this novel, the epigraph, a dictionary definition, riffs on what flight might mean. The novel thoughtfully, deftly, interlaces a series of flights—to and from Ireland. Ireland has typically been a place of mass export of population, until the advent of the Celtic Tiger, or perhaps a decade or two before it began to rear up, and this novel set around 2004 but moving much further back in time, takes up issues of migration and refugees that became pressing in the prosperous years.