It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination.įrom 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. 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. 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.

That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. 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. 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. Scott, New York Times Book Review, cover reviewįollowing 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.

A BookPage Top Fiction Pick of the Month.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

An Amazon Editors' Top 20 Book of the Year.

A New York Post Best Book of the Year.

A San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year.

A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year.

A Christian Science Monitor Top 15 Fiction Book of the Year.

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.Wall Street Journal’s Best Novel of the Year.ALA Carnegie Medal Finalist for Excellence in Fiction.An NBCC Finalist for 2016 Award for Fiction.

Moonglow novel