Slipstream, Leslie Larson
Slipstream, Leslie Larson
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Slipstream

Author: Leslie Larson

Narrator: Stephen Hoye

Unabridged: 11 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/16/2006

Synopsis

In Slipstream, Leslie Larson traces the intertwining paths of five characters as each struggles to stay afloat in the face of major setbacks, minor failures, and a reckless pursuit of elusive second chances. When Rudy loses his job cleaning jets at the airport, his sanity and his marriage threaten to follow. While his wife, Inez, secretly saves her pennies and plots an escape, his coworker Wylie, a bartender at LAX, is about to receive the surprise of his life. Meanwhile, Wylie’s brother, Logan, freshly released from jail, tries desperately to stay out of trouble while traipsing through a minefield of temptation. And Logan’s daughter Jewell is nursing a heart broken once by an unfaithful girlfriend and again by a father who can’t seem to stick around. Though they don’t know it, these five people are headed toward an explosive event that will have consequences for them all.

Deftly weaving suspense, humor, and revelation, Slipstream is a rich human drama with the breathless pace of a thriller and the soul of classic noir.

Also available as a Books on Tape AudioBook and as an eBook

About The Author

Leslie Larson grew up in San Diego to a working class family. After earning a degree in literature at the University of California, San Diego, she moved to London and began working in publishing. She eventually moved back to California and began freelance writing. In 2006, she published her first novel, Slipstream, which won the Astraea Award for Fiction. Stephen Hoye has worked as a professional actor in London and Los Angeles for more than 30 years. Trained at Boston University and The Guildhall in London, he has appeared in several feature films, television series, and on stage in London’s West End.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Gray on July 04, 2020

Meh......more

Goodreads review by Cher on July 23, 2011

This story held my attention from the second page. I had picked this book up a few months ago after reading Ms. Larson's most recent work "Breaking Out of Bedlam" and in the interim I had forgotten the premise of this book, but the well-drawn characters and the interwoven storylines drew me in so th......more

Goodreads review by Patrice on January 25, 2014

Slipstream presents the stories of a handful of people that all connect in one way or another to the Los Angeles Airport. Just under a month of their lives is explored in chapters that rotate the narrator from all of the characters. That's a writing style that I particularly enjoy, as long as it's d......more

Goodreads review by Pam on September 23, 2007

SLIPSTREAM by Leslie Larson RATING: 4.5/B+ GENRE/PUB DATE/# OF PGS: Fiction/2006/320 pgs TIME/PLACE: Present; Los Angeles, CA CHARACTERS: Tom Logan/bartender; Jewel/student & Tom's niece COMMENTS: Ensemble cast of people on the fringe -- surviving, ekeing out a living -- bartender at LAX; laid-off mainte......more

Goodreads review by Nakia on December 27, 2016

I listened to the audio version. My new get through traffic obsession... I listened. I waited. I listened. I waited for something to happen. I listened some more. The book ended and ... NOTHING! I thought this book was about, and I quote "Leslie Larson traces the intertwining paths of five character......more

Quotes

“Hilarious and heartbreaking all at once—no easy feat, but the mark of great storytelling.” —Sandra Cisneros

“This exceptional first novel is pitch-perfect in its authentic, insightful portrayals of fatefully intersecting lives. . . . The writing is pure pleasure—as clean and clear as glass.” —Katherine V. Forrest, author of Hancock Park

“Slipstream is a genuinely startling novel that caught me up in the lives of people being looked past, over, or beyond. Larson’s people are alive on the page, and they pulled me along with them as things got scarier and scarier until. . . . Well, you have to read the book to learn that—and trust me, it will be worth it.” —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

“Leslie Larson has an unshakable confidence in her capacity fully to inhabit her characters, each brought vividly into wriggling, yammering life by her unerring talent. Slipstream demands to be read from start to finish, if at all possible in one long, shivering gulp.” —Peter Straub, author of In the Night Room

“In Leslie Larson’s novel Slipstream, the question is not why we leave but that we leave again and again, each time set against the incredible drama of our surreal lives. She inhabits her sharp, incisive, smart novel with lives we know and know of, sometimes too closely, lives that begin and begin again and seem to end and end again, departures and arrivals amidst the terror of our daily chaos.” —Lois-Ann Yamanaka, author of Behold the Many

“For all its deft plotting and effective suspense, Slipstream is most memorable for its portraits of characters negotiating the difference between just getting by and moving forward. Larson renders beautifully a lower-middle-class California that’s being squeezed out of a place to live, and provides an intricate and moving sense of the way in which such characters’ lives go wrong and the persistence of their resolve to turn them around.” —Jim Shepard, author of Love and Hydrogen

“As Leslie Larson reminds us in this brilliant novel, everyone in L.A. is just three degrees of separation from the next small apocalypse.” —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

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