LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION
"In this extraordinary novel, Castleberry brilliantly hopscotches from
person to person, from era to era, while somehow making all this fancy
footwork look effortless and essential." - Jenny Offill, author of
Department of Speculation and Weather
A luminous debut novel in the tradition of DeLillo and Egan,
chronicling the eerily intersecting lives of a series of American
dreamers whose unforeseen links reveal the divided heart of a haunted
nation--and the battered grace that might lead to its salvation
June 26, 1947. Headlines across America report the sighting of nine
pulsating lights flying over the Cascade Mountains at speeds surpassing
any aircraft. In Chicago, inspired by the news, Oliver Danville, a
failed actor now reduced to a mediocre pool hustler, hitchhikes west in
a fever-dream quest for a possible sign from above that might illuminate
his true calling. A chance encounter with Saul Penrod, an Idaho farmer,
and his family sets in motion the birth of "the Seekers"--a collective
of outcasts, interlopers, and idealists devoted to creating a society
where divisions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are a thing of the
past. When Claudette Donen, a waitress on the lam from her suffocating
family, encounters the group, she is compulsively drawn to Oliver's
sister Eileen, but before she is able to join the enigmatic community,
it has vanished.
Reunited across the country, the Seekers attempt to settle in the
suburbs of Long Island. One night, their purpose suddenly revealed, a
stranger emerges, and a horrific crime ensues. In the decades that
follow, the perpetrators, survivors, and their children will be forced
to face the consequences of what happened--a reckoning that will involve
Charlie Ranagan, a traveling salesman; Max Felt, a dissolute late-1960s
rock star; Alice Linwood, an increasingly paranoid radio host; Stanley
West, a struggling African American poet; Marly Feldberg, a Greenwich
Village painter; and Debbie Vasquez, a Connecticut teenager trapped by
an avalanche of midnight legacies. Each will prove to be a piece of a
puzzle that, when assembled, reveals a shocking truth about the clash
between the optimism of those who seek inspiration from spacious skies,
and the venom of others who relish the underworld--not only via
conspiratorial maneuverings, but the literal unearthing of the dead. The
result is one of the most exciting, and unforgettable, debut novels in
recent memory, and the launch of a major career in American letters.
