Out of the Air

David Lindsay returned from the war with a chest full of medals and a mind full of holes. The skies over France made sense to him in ways that New York never will: clean lines, direct paths, the elegant geometry of flight. Now he wanders Manhattan in a fog of troubled sleep and half-remembered trauma, haunted by something he can't name, drafting literary projects he'll never finish. Then there's Susannah Ayer, a young woman carving out her own precarious space in the city, her struggles threading into Lindsay's until their stories collide in ways neither expects. Gillmore, writing in the war's immediate aftermath, captures something vital about the lost generation: the alienation that no victory parade can cure, the way the machines of modernity leave their operators permanently hollowed. This is postwar America with the glamour stripped away, a city that feels both electric and alienating, and two people searching for footing on ground that won't stay solid.