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Moonglow

Moonglow 1

by Michael Chabon
Hardback
Publication Date: 01/12/2016
4/5 Rating 1 Review

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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.

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as "my grandfather." It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, 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 the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies.

A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow ranges from the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to New York's Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of 'the American Century'. Collapsing an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week, Moonglow is 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 daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.

'His most beautifully realized novel to date .... a masterful and resounding novel of the dark and blazing forces that forged our tumultuous, confounding, and precious world.' - Booklist, starred review

'Charming and elegantly structured.... What seduces the reader is Chabon's language, which reinvents the world, joyously, on almost every page.' - Publishers Weekly

'Luminous.... The story builds to core revelations of wartime horror and postwar heartbreak as powerful as they come.' - Library Journal, starred review

'Moonglow blurs the line between autobiography and fiction in interesting ways, and manages to feel more artful than most memoirs and more true than most novels.' - Bookish

ISBN:
9781460753224
9781460753224
Category:
Literature & literary studies
Format:
Hardback
Publication Date:
01-12-2016
Publisher:
HarperCollins Publishers
Country of origin:
Australia
Pages:
448
Dimensions (mm):
234x153mm
Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Summerland (a novel for children), The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and Gentlemen of the Road, as well as the short story collections A Model World and Werewolves in Their Youth and the essay collections Maps and Legends and Manhood for Amateurs.

He is the chairman of the board of the MacDowell Colony. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

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At the end of the 80s, the young novelist Michael Chabon paid visit to his sick grandfather, who, sky-high on end-of-life pain medication, told him the wildest truths (and probably lies) about his life to date. Stories of war, love and loss, sex and spaceflight, and of getting himself arrested. Now, decades later, Michael has turned this conversation into a delightful novel.

Moonglow is an extravaganza for the reader. Full of classic Jewish-American humour and historical goodies from the twilight of World War Two and the dawn of the Space Race, this book will rocket you to dizzying heights.

Contains Spoilers No
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