Moonglow (Hardcover)

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends and existential adventure - and the forces that work to destroy us. In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather." It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact - and the creative power - of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow ranges from the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to New York's Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of 'the American Century'. Collapsing an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week, Moonglow is a lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir. Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque. 'His most beautifully realized novel to date ...a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.' Booklist, starred review 'Elegiac and deeply poignant ...a tapestry that's as complicated, beautiful and flawed as an antique carpet.' Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times 'Charming and elegantly structured...What seduces the reader is Chabon's language, which reinvents the world, joyously, on almost every page.' Publishers Weekly 'A wondrous book that celebrates the power of family bonds and the slipperiness of memory...A thoroughly enchanting story about the circuitous path that a life follows, about the accidents that redirect it, and about the secrets that can be felt but never seen, like the dark matter at the centre of every family's cosmos.' The Washington Post 'Mix[es] in generous dollops of meaning, a sprinkling of fancy metaphors and an abundance of beautiful sentences so that it becomes a rich and exotic confection. Too strict a recipe would have spoiled the charm of this layer cake of nested memories and family legends...This book is beautiful.' New York Times Book Review 'A poignant, engrossing triumph.' People 'An often rollicking, ultimately moving read. And like the song, it's liable to stay with you.' NPR 'Luminous...The story builds to core revelations of wartime horror and postwar heartbreak as powerful as they come.' Library Journal, starred review 'Moonglow blurs the line between autobiography and fiction in interesting ways, and manages to feel more artful than most memoirs and more true than most novels.' - Bookish