Description:

Duncan's whole world is the orphanage where he lives. Aged ten, he is sure that his mother is dead until the day she turns up to claim him. Maggie Bright, a soprano who was once the talent of her generation, now sings in a run-down bar through a haze of whisky and regret. She often finishes up in the arms of Joshua McGreevey, a Vietnam vet who earns his living as part of a tunneling crew seventy feet beneath the Bay. Thrown into this adult world of mysterious suffering, Duncan finds comfort in an ancient radio - from which tumble the voices of Apollo mission astronauts who never came home - and dreams of one day finding his father. ** ### From Booklist *Starred Review* Duncan Bright, age 10 in 1980, remembers being born in a catastrophic blizzard and God speaking to him at that moment . . . and nothing else. Reclaimed by his mother, Maggie, whom he presumed dead, from a loving but bleak Catholic orphanage, Duncan maintains an aura of purity and goodness. He settles into a dreary life with his mother hard by the battered wharves of the San Francisco Bay among the forgotten poor. This literary novel soars and at times flat-out wanders off into reveries about pain, waste, angels, death, the ethereal beauty of song, traumatized Vietnam veterans, and Duncan’s imagined fate of the Apollo 11 astronauts who never return to earth (the title refers to Buzz Aldrin’s description of the lunar surface). O’Malley writes shimmering, luminescent prose. But the novel feels episodic at times, and the litany of despair may tire some readers. Yet it is a deeply spiritual novel about dissipation and waste. Although Duncan remains an enigma, Maggie is a fully realized character, a great opera singer whose career is snuffed out when her vocal chords are shredded following her breakthrough brilliant performance. Regrets, resignation, and a spiraling alcoholism fill her days as an occasional saloon singer, as she nevertheless provides Duncan with a love of great purity, filled with uncertain adventure. --Jonathan Schwartz ### Review A beautiful, floating novel. Thomas O'Malley writes with grace and style and bravery. There is not an ounce of cynicism here. While most of us remain earthbound, O'Malley allows us to believe that we can, at various times, go to an imaginative elsewhere. Even the desolation can have its own magnificence. O'Malley is a great talent, reminiscent of another fine Irish writer, Sebastian Barry Colum McCann A beautifully structured work ... A moving and deeply affecting fiction which calls for engaged, even obsessive reading. It is a work of great artistic merit Irish Examiner Marvellous ... A sensitive depiction of haunted and scarred characters Lady There is more than a little of the Irish cadence evident in his lyrical and mellifluous prose Sunday Herald This literary novel soars ... O'Malley writes shimmering, luminescent prose Booklist Astonishing ... A novel so immersive that it blurs the line between its characters' lives and the life of the reader... One of the best novels you're likely to read this year Star Tribune