Book description
>
Duncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary
outpost in the snowy expanse of northern Minnesota. Aged ten in 1980, he
has no memories of his life before now, but he has stories that he
recites like prayers: the story of how his mother brought him here
during the worst blizzard of the century; the story of how God spoke to
him at his birth and gave him a special purpose.
Duncan 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 San Francisco bar through a haze of whisky
cut with sharp 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. He smells of sea silt and loam, as if
he has been dredged from the deep bottom of the world - and his wounds
run deep too.
Thrown into this mysterious adult world, Duncan finds comfort in an
ancient radio, from which tumble the voices of Apollo mission astronauts
who never came home, and dreams of finding his real father.
A heart-breaking, staggering, soaring novel, This Magnificent Desolation
allows a child's perspective to illuminate a dark world, and explores
the creeping devastation of war, the many facets of loneliness and the
redemptive power of the imagination. B>
A heart-breaking, staggering, soaring novel about war, music, loneliness
and the redemptive power of the imagination< >
Duncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary
outpost in the snowy expanse of northern Minnesota. Aged ten in 1980, he
has no memories of his life before now, but he has stories that he
recites like prayers: the story of how his mother brought him here
during the worst blizzard of the century; the story of how God spoke to
him at his birth and gave him a special purpose.
Duncan 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 San Francisco bar through a haze of whisky
cut with sharp 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. He smells of sea silt and loam, as if
he has been dredged from the deep bottom of the world - and his wounds
run deep too.
Thrown into this mysterious adult world, Duncan finds comfort in an
ancient radio, from which tumble the voices of Apollo mission astronauts
who never came home, and dreams of finding his real father.
A heart-breaking, staggering, soaring novel, This Magnificent Desolation
allows a child's perspective to illuminate a dark world, and explores
the creeping devastation of war, the many facets of loneliness and the
redemptive power of the imagination. B>
A heart-breaking, staggering, soaring novel about war, music, loneliness
and the redemptive power of the imagination<
