Moonglow - Large Print by Michael Chabon (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

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 before heard, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten.

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 also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which the author devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.

Review Quotes

"The grandfather is a terrific character: difficult, complex, admirable--at once unique and typical of a generation.... Audacious and accomplished, Moonglow is a four-hundred-page love letter to that generation, and one is thankful to Chabon for having brought one of those characters so vividly back to life." - Francine Prose, New York Review of Books
"An exuberant meld of fiction and family history.... It's the caliber of his writing-evocative sentences and indelible metaphors-that gives the novel its luster.... Moonglow prisms through a single life the desires and despair of the Greatest Generation, whose small steps and giant leaps continue to shape us all." - Hamilton Cain, O Magazine
"Like The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, and especially The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, this is classic Chabon: an intensely personal story uplifted by the shifting tectonic plates of truth and memory, floating atop his inimitably crafted, sometimes audacious, always original prose." - Jon Foro, The Amazon Book Review, Spotlight Pick
"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." - November Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated
"Sparkling, richly satisfying." - BookPage, Top Fiction Pick
"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
"Moonglow is another literary tour de force by one of America's great writers, extraordinary rich and poignant." - Jonathyan Kirsch, The Jewish Journal
"His prose is as luminous as ever." - Entertainment Weekly
"Absolutely brilliant.... Stylistically and emotionally, Moonglow took our breath away over and over." - iBooks Review
"Intoxicating." - David Wright, Seattle Times
"You will not find better, funnier, more varied writing in a novel this year." - Katy Waldman, Slate
"Chabon aims for the moon and successfully touches down on the lunar surface.... An emotional tale of love and loss; fabulous, at times magical, writing. Moonglow floats through time and space to carry the reader to a fascinating new world." - Jonathan Elderfield, Associated Press
"All stories worth telling are at their hearts mysteries, a search for missing pieces. This is true of both fact and fiction, a point the book deftly makes by the sly counterpoint of those categories. In Moonglow, Chabon has taken on that search with a quiet, cosmic playfulness." - Talya Zax, Forward
"Perhaps the most accessible of America's great literary novelists since the death of John Updike." - Kevin Nance, USA Today, starred review
"Chabon renders an entire era within a single deathbed confession--a scale model of life after the Second World War." - Cody Delistraty, The New Yorker
"An exercise in exploring the slippery nature of truth, memory and what makes a compelling story. Are stories 'just names and dates and places [that don't] add up to anything?' like Grandpa suggests? Or are they, instead, something more illusive, more aching, more mysterious and meaningful. In terms of Moonglow, it's definitely the latter." - Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle
"Utterly enchanting. Chabon makes you believe, even as you know you're being pulled along by the romance of a good story. Moonglow is a novel about faith in storytelling itself." - Christine Pivovar, The Rumpus
"Fascinating." - Harper Barnes, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"A poignant, engrossing triumph." - People