Inspired by and structured around the chamber piece of the same title by
the French composer Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time is a
mesmerizing story of four lives irrevocably linked in a single act of
betrayal. The novel takes us on an unforgettable journey beginning
during the 1930s Bonus Army riots, when World War I veteran Arthur
Sinclair is falsely accused of conspiracy and then disappears. His
absence will haunt his son, Douglas, as well as Alden and Sutton Kelly,
the children of a powerful U.S. congressman, as they experience--each in
different ways--the dynamic political social changes that took place
leading up to and during World War II.
From the New Deal projects through which Douglas, newly fatherless,
makes his living to Sutton's work as a journalist, to Alden's life as a
code breaker and a spy, each character is haunted by the past and is
searching for love, hope, and redemption in a world torn apart by chaos
and war. Through the lives of these characters, as well as those of
their lovers, friends, and enemies, the novel transports us from the
Siberian Expedition of World War I to the underground world of a Soviet
spy in the 1920s and 1930s, to the occultist circle of P. D. Ouspensky
and London during the Blitz, to the German prison camp where Messiaen
originally composed and performed his famous Quartet for the End of
Time.
At every turn, this rich and ambitious novel tells some of the less
well-known stories of twentieth-century history with epic scope and
astonishing power, revealing at every turn the ways in which history and
memory tend to follow us, and in which absence has a palpable presence.
