The narrator walks to the Oder river as a child and decides that movement is always better than rest.

Kunicki's wife Jagoda and young son vanish without trace from the woods during a family vacation on the island of Vis.

Kunicki becomes a suspect in his family's disappearance and is formally interrogated by the Croatian police.

The narrator meets Aleksandra in a Stockholm airport hotel bar after both agree to vacate their seats on an overbooked flight.

Eryk the ferry captain deliberately steers his passengers into open sea instead of toward the mainland and is later imprisoned.

A young sultan stabs his mother Menchu in the stomach and flees with the palace children as an army closes in.

Josefine Soliman writes her first letter to Emperor Francis I demanding the return of her father Angelo's preserved body.

Taina, the widow of Professor Mole, shows Dr. Blau a perfectly preserved orange cat nearly indistinguishable from her living one.

Philip Verheyen names the Achilles tendon after showing his student van Horssen a sample taken from his preserved amputated leg.

Verheyen and van Horssen attend Ruysch's theatrical public dissection of a young Italian woman whose body has been preserved for over two years.

Annushka spots a woman named Galina shouting near Kievsky Station and buys them both sandwiches from a nearby cart.

The biologist places a morphine patch on her terminally ill former lover and then injects him with a lethal poison.

Chopin's sister Ludwika smuggles his preserved heart across the Polish border concealed under her skirt.

Kunicki returns home after following Jagoda on her day off to find she has permanently left with their son.

The narrator visits a final plastination exhibit and reflects that writing preserves and immortalizes people just as plastination does.

The narrator's childhood walks to the Oder river inspire a lifelong philosophy of constant movement over rest. Kunicki's wife and son mysteriously vanish on a Croatian island, setting in motion an obsessive search for truth that reshapes his identity. The narrator's travels bring her into contact with Aleksandra, anatomical exhibitions, and a vivid cast of historical and fictional characters united by themes of preservation and loss. Verheyen's anatomical discoveries, Josefine's desperate letters, and Annushka's flight into the Moscow metro all explore what it means to move away from stasis. As the biologist ends her lover's suffering and Ludwika smuggles Chopin's heart across a border, the novel builds toward Kunicki's final, devastating loss of his family. The narrator's closing reflections on plastination confirm that preserving people through writing is her answer to mortality and movement.

The headline events driving Flights from beginning to end.

While working as a maid, the narrator begins writing a novel for the first time.

The narrator self-diagnoses 'Recurrent Detoxification Syndrome' as her compulsion to seek out things that are spoiled, flawed, or broken.

Kunicki photographs all of Jagoda's belongings in the hotel room and finds a museum ticket with 'kairos' written on its back.

Kunicki visits the ferry dock and questions the ticket seller, hoping to spot Jagoda among departing passengers.

The narrator describes airports as self-contained cities and introduces the Three Basic Travel Questions people ask one another.

Eryk discovers a copy of Moby-Dick in a foreign prison library and reads it repeatedly, viewing the find as synchronicity.

Dr. Blau's father takes him as a boy to see the transparent glass man exhibit at Dresden's Hygiene Museum.

Taina leads Dr. Blau into Professor Mole's laboratory and he covertly memorizes everything he finds there.

Josefine writes a second letter to Emperor Francis I invoking his own father's argument that all people are equal at birth.

Van Horssen visits Verheyen and finds him dissecting his preserved leg down to its smallest component parts, his servant alarmed.

Charlotta watches from the port as the ship carrying her father Ruysch's entire preserved collection sails away toward Russia.

The crew of Peter I's transport ship drinks Ruysch's preserving liquid and damages specimens, and the captain is sent into exile.

Annushka and Galina are arrested after rushing at a young horsewoman who strikes her agitated horse with a whip.

Beached whales in Australia attract media, volunteers, and animal rights protesters who argue the whales are choosing their own deaths.

The professor's fatal stroke occurs when the cruise ship Poseidon swerves sharply to avoid a small yacht during his lecture.

The narrator's early life as a maid-turned-writer and her self-diagnosis with an attraction to broken things establish the compulsive curiosity that drives the whole book. Kunicki's meticulous cataloguing of Jagoda's belongings and his visit to the ferry dock reveal his deepening desperation to impose meaning on her disappearance. Characters like Eryk, Dr. Blau, and Charlotta each undergo a pivotal secondary moment — Eryk finds spiritual meaning in a prison library, Blau covertly memorizes a dead man's laboratory, and Charlotta watches her father's life's work sail away to Russia. The crew destroying Ruysch's collection and Annushka's arrest after defending a horse mark emotional turning points in their respective vignettes. Beached whales in Australia and a professor's fatal stroke cap the novel's secondary arc, enriching its themes of movement, mortality, and human responsibility. Together these moments fill in the world that the main plot only sketches.

Significant moments and details that deepen the novel's world.

The narrator resents personality profiling during psychology training and decides to abandon her career in favor of travel and writing.

The narrator visits an anatomical showcase of bones, organs, and preserved specimens that intensifies her compulsion to travel and observe.

A sudden flood forces the entire island of Vis to evacuate, temporarily halting all efforts to find Kunicki's missing family.

The narrator visits a Vienna wax anatomical exhibit displaying detailed cross sections of the human body and is deeply fascinated.

Dr. Blau discovers a tattooed arm preserved in Ruysch's mysterious liquid while cataloguing specimens at a Berlin museum.

Dr. Blau rejects Taina's romantic advances to protect his access to the laboratory, and she coolly calls him a taxi.

A travel psychologist lectures that space and time are human constructs that dissolve entirely for those who live in constant movement.

Verheyen confesses to van Horssen that phantom limb pain has driven him to obsessively dissect and study his preserved leg.

Van Horssen learns after Verheyen's funeral that his mentor was buried without the preserved amputated leg he had long treasured.

The narrator pauses her writing to ask herself whether she is doing the right thing by telling stories at all.

Galina tells Annushka that true freedom from obligation begins the moment one simply forgets one's home address.

Josefine's third letter to Emperor Francis I argues that the monarchy exercises power by deciding which bodies deserve dignity and respect.

The biologist decides to visit her dying former lover in Poland and lies to her husband about attending a scientific conference.

Jagoda and their son return to Kunicki after three days away, claiming they simply became lost during the island flood.

The narrator aboard the cruise ship Poseidon attends the elderly professor's lecture connecting the Greek god Kairos to circular time.

From the narrator's rejection of psychology to her first visit to an anatomical showcase, the opening sections establish the decisions that shape her restless, compulsive identity. The flood that empties Vis island, Dr. Blau's failed seduction of Taina, and Verheyen's confession of phantom-limb obsession each mark moments when characters are forced to confront what they truly want. The narrator's quiet question to herself — whether storytelling is morally justified — sits at the heart of the book's reflective mid-section. Characters like Galina, Josefine, and the biologist each reach a moment of radical choice, from advising someone to forget their address to deciding to end a life out of love. Jagoda's unexpected return to Kunicki and the Kairos lecture aboard the Poseidon bring the novel's themes of circular time and the perfect moment into sharp focus. These revelations collectively explain why the narrator keeps moving, keeps writing, and refuses to stay still.