With Air, John Boyne brings his quartet of elemental novellas to a close, and it feels like a strong, fitting conclusion—though I was a little sad to finish the series. Like the others, Air is an easy book to read in terms of pace and prose, yet it has serious things to say about how trauma and guilt echo through a lifetime and even across generations. Trauma, and especially sexual trauma, has been the theme running through the quartet. Each novel has approached it from a different perspective and in a different register, and Air feels like both a continuation and a resolution.

This time the focus is on Aaron, an Australian psychologist, and his teenage son Emmet, travelling together on a long-haul flight. The story is simple on the surface, yet through their conversations, silences, and the memories that intrude, Boyne unpacks complex legacies of abuse and loss. Both Aaron and Emmet are characters who feel fully human: flawed, searching, recognisable. I thought the dialogue in particular was strikingly lifelike: it was clipped, awkward, occasionally funny, often freighted with things unsaid.

As with the earlier volumes, what struck me was the quality of the storytelling. Boyne has a knack for stitching together past and present, personal memory and wider history, without the seams showing. It is years since I read Water, yet the connections in Air to earlier characters and settings came immediately to mind. I never felt lost or in need of a refresher, but nor did I feel weighed down by slabs of exposition. That balancing act must have been fiendishly difficult to pull off in practice, but it reads as effortless.

Air may not be as dramatic or heightened as Fire, nor as claustrophobic as Earth, but it closes the cycle with grace and clarity. The quartet as a whole is a study in how people carry damage, sometimes with resilience, sometimes with bitterness, sometimes unknowingly passing it on. To have sustained that theme across four compact novels without repetition, and with each volume offering genuinely different insights, is a real achievement.

Boyne has long been a master of drawing us into characters who are scarred, contradictory and complete. Air is no exception. As a conclusion to the Elements series, it left me satisfied, moved, and ready to recommend all four books.

I recently walked past Leith Library which is almost a century old. I did not expect to later discover that, in 1976, an elephant popped in:

This photo is courtesy of The Scotsman, 15 January 1976, where it is reported that:

Indras, a five-year old female elephant now appearing in a circus at Leith Theatre, is helping Edinburgh Library Service in their campaign to remind people to return their books on time. She carried a load of books yesterday to Leith Library, where Mr Peter Allan (70), of Portland Street, Leith (left), questions whether the table will stand her weight.

The past truly is a different universe.

On 9 March, Wendy and I found ourselves on a flight from Belfast to Newcastle. As we approached our destination, the captain came over the tannoy.

Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies, but we’re currently unable to land at Newcastle. Work on the runway means that the lights are currently inoperable, and the current fog means that we cannot land without runway lights. We will circle for a while to see if the fog clears, but otherwise, we may need to divert.

Disappointment turned to dismay as the fog only thickened, and the captain eventually confirmed that we would be diverted… back to Belfast.

A few months later, dismay turned to disbelief as we stared at this chunk of runway tarmac in Newcastle Airport’s 90th anniversary exhibition:

It claimed, in black and white, that the runway resurfacing in March 2025 had been successfully completed ‘without disrupting the flight schedule’.

I beg to differ.