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 - A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
- An NPR Best Book of the Year - A Slate Best Book of the Year -
A Christian Science Monitor Top 15 Fiction Book of the Year - A New
York Magazine Best Book of the Year - A San Francisco Chronicle
Book of the Year - A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year - A New York
Post Best Book of the Year
iBooks Novel of the Year - An Amazon Editors' Top 20 Book of the
Year - #1 Indie Next Pick - #1 Amazon Spotlight Pick - A New
York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - A BookPage Top Fiction
Pick of the Month - An Indie Next Bestseller
"This book is beautiful." -- A.O. Scott, New York Times Book
Review, cover review
Following on the heels of his New York Times 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.
Moonglow 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, Moonglow is Chabon at his
most moving and inventive.
