Over the course of 12 masterfully sketched stories, each one focusing on a different individual on the move, he circumnavigates this small planet and highlights humankind’s interconnectedness.... Whether in the clouds or on terra firma, Szalay’s travelers are shocked and shaken by various traumas. By rights, his pared-back prose and miniature portraits should be able to describe and convey only so much. But as in his previous novel “All That Man Is,” his light touches and fleeting glimpses belie great insight and depth.

“Turbulence” is a sleek machine with a cool tone. Each chapter picks up from the last, but presents a new protagonist, as if a moral baton were being passed. The chapters come full circle. In the end, the book resembles a snake that’s begun to consume its own tail.

David Szalay’s “Turbulence” began life in 2018 as a series on the BBC’s Radio 4. The resulting book, first published last year in the United Kingdom, shares the radio program’s episodic nature, relaying 12 stories about characters whose lives are linked via air travel and whose in-flight anxieties have nothing on the troubles awaiting them on the ground.... A person who is introduced in one chapter becomes the protagonist of the next, and the book starts and ends in London, touching down in Madrid, Dakar, Senegal, Seattle and elsewhere in between. While some characters within each story are strangers to one another, meeting on a plane, in a taxi or through a hookup app, many are related by blood or marriage. Few are happy. No one’s trip goes as planned.

The slender new novel from Szalay—whose most recent book, All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016—is a (world) tour de force, an exploration in fiction of the concept of six degrees of separation.... The chapters are tiny cross sections of lives, lovingly examined under the writer's microscope. The result is a book that is high concept but—thanks to Szalay's gift for compression and the same empathetic imagination that was on display in All That Man Is—never gimmicky. Szalay has devised an ingenious way to accommodate enormous range in a miniature form. Subtle, smart—a triumph.