Dimensions
132 x 145 x 40mm
In 1989 Michael Chabon traveled to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather uncovered bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for Moonglow.The novel unfolds as 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 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.Performed by George Newbern
