Moonglow

A Novel

by Michael Chabon

On Sale: 10/03/2017

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Moonglow

A Novel

by Michael Chabon

On Sale: 10/03/2017

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Amazon Indigo

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Book Overview
Author Info

LibraryReads Selection

National Book Critics Circle Award

About the Book

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 of 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 mid-century 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 of 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 pre-war 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 non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.

Critical Praise

“Chabon imbricates his characters’ particular histories with broader, detail-rich narratives of war, migration, and technological advances. . . . What seduces the reader is Chabon’s language, which reinvents the world, joyously, on almost every page.” — Publishers Weekly

“A nearly 500-page epic, Moonglow explores the war, sex, and technology of mid-century America in all its glory and folly. It’s simultaneously Chabon’s most imaginative and personal work to date.” — The Millions

“Chabon has created a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.” — Booklist

“This grand saga is a supreme exercise of imagination blended with acute historical detail.” — Library Journal

“This is Chabon’s finest work in years. It is at once a story of the horrors of war and the compromises we make for love and family.” — Pittsburgh Magazine

“From the Jewish neighborhoods of Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Floridian retirement communities to penal colonies at home and war camps abroad, Chabon’s newest journey proves well worth the wait.” — Jewish Book Council