NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLER
Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal
-
An NBCC Finalist for 2016 Award for Fiction
ALA Carnegie Medal Finalist for Excellence in Fiction
- Wall Street Journal
's Best Novel of the Year
A
New York Times
Notable Book of the Year
Washington Post
Best Book of the Year
An NPR Best Book of the Year
Slate
Christian Science Monitor
Top 15 Fiction Book of the Year
New York Magazine
San Francisco Chronicle
Book of the Year
Buzzfeed
New York Post
iBooks Novel of the Year
An Amazon Editors' Top 20 Book of the Year
#1 Indie Next Pick
#1 Amazon Spotlight Pick
New York Times Book Review
Editors' Choice
BookPage
Top Fiction Pick of the Month
An Indie Next Bestseller
"This book is beautiful."
--
A.O. Scott,
, cover review
Following on the heels of his
bestselling novel
Telegraph Avenue
, 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. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel
Moonglow
, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.
unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather." It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact--and the creative power--of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator's grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.
From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York's Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the "American Century," the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir,
is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.