The Seaplane on Final Approach | Granta

  • Published: 09/06/2022
  • ISBN: 9781783786060
  • Granta Books
  • 288 pages

The Seaplane on Final Approach

Rebecca Rukeyser

Tourists arrive all summer, by boat or seaplane, at Stu and Maureen Jenkins’s Lavender Island Wilderness Lodge in the Kodiak Archipelago, expecting adventure. But the spontaneity of their authentic Alaskan wilderness experience is meticulously scripted, except when real danger rears its head. Stu and Maureen’s lodge is failing, as is their marriage.

Mira has been hired for the season as the lodge’s baker and housekeeper. But she’s also busy gleefully nursing twin obsessions: building a working theory of what constitutes ‘sleaze’ and pursuing a young fisherman she deems the embodiment of all things deliciously sleazy. Her plans become more perverse and elaborate, even as life on Lavender Island starts to unravel.

By midseason, it becomes clear that Stu, the jovial, predatory patriarch of the lodge, has turned his sexual attentions to another young employee. As the mood of the lodge spirals into chaos, the inhabitants realize just how isolated Lavender Island really is.

Hilarious, sensual, and charged with menace, The Seaplane on Final Approach brilliantly illuminates the mirage-thin line between the artificial and the feral. In this daring and psychologically razor-sharp debut, Rukeyser’s characters tear aside the facade of good manners to reveal all of our deepest needs and naked desires.

I didn't realize how much I needed this lusty, funny, heart-breaking book until I devoured it in a single sitting... A sharp, flawless debut

Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

An age-old story-puppy love meets jaded lust to dance their death spiral inside a young woman's head-told with the shameless authenticity of 2022. I ate it up

Nell Zink

Original and adventurous, horny and hilarious-it's everything I want from a book.

Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

The Author

Rebecca Rukeyser is the recipient of the inaugural Berlin Senate grant for non-German literature. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as ZYZZYVA, the Massachusetts Review and Best American Nonrequired Reading. She earned her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and teaches writing at Bard College Berlin. She is the author of The Seaplane on Final Approach which is published by Granta Books in the UK.

More about the author →

Rebecca Rukeyser on Granta.com

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