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.