Setting a thriller inside LAX is a gamble. Author Alexander Maksik makes it unforgettable
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Set us as preferred On the Shelf Passengers By Alexander MaksikEuropa Editions: 256 pages, $26If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.With its gridlocked terminals, infuriating delays and long lines for everything from security checks to coffee, LAX might be where patience goes to die.It’s a place most dream of escaping; instead L.A.-born novelist Alexander Maksik takes readers inside the airport to witness both the unease and shared humanity of people passing through.
Longlisted for the 2026 National Book Award in fiction, Maksik’s new novel, “Passengers,” unfolds within the airport’s sprawling concourses.The story centers on Ivan and Nina, a distant father and daughter meeting up for a flight to Paris.
For 75-year-old Ivan, it’s a chance to show his daughter where he once lived.For 29-year-old Nina, it’s a free trip and an opportunity to finally understand a parent she barely knows.
When their flight is delayed, and then delayed again, frustration shifts from the departure boards to the fault lines between them.Maksik, speaking via video conference from his Parisian apartment, always planned that the book would be about a father-daughter pair.“When my daughter was born, like many new parents, I found I could only think in clichés, and I didn’t try to resist them,” he says.
“But as time went by, I started to toy with the idea of writing a novel about a father and daughter in which the battle against cliché would become central, would take on huge, even life-saving, importance.”The author also plays with the idea of nostalgia.“Nostalgia brings you close to the edge of real feeling without forcing you to confront the weight, power and terror of real feeling.
It’s too easy to keep yourself wrapped up in the false ease of the past.” One of the things that airports remind us of, he says, is c...