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 of the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain in the ongoing magic act that is the art of Michael Chabon. Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow is also a tour de force of speculative history in which Chabon attempts to reconstruct the mysterious origins and fate of Chabon Scientific, Co., an authentic mail-order novelty company whose ads for scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets were once a fixture in the back pages of Esquire, Popular Mechanics and Boy’s Life. Along the way Chabon devises and reveals, in bits and pieces whose hallucinatory intensity is matched only by their comic vigor and the radiant moonglow of his prose, 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,” Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.

NUBClub decided to read Moonglow for two reasons: love of Chabon's other work in fable making, notably Cavalier and Clay and Yiddish Policeman's Union, and the premise of a biography filled with lies. We felt this novel delivered on both points. Chabon's meandering and fantastical story of his grandmother and grandfather is touching and entertaining without becoming too diffuse or contrived. Chabon writes beautifully here, and particularly beautifully in the depiction of his grandmother (a witch like mystery with a genius for storytelling) and his grandfather (practically an action hero, albeit in at a smaller scale of reptile hunting in his later life) and in their connection. There are books that are just a joy to read paragraph by paragraph, and this is one of them. At the same time, Chabon's brilliance in this novel is that despite the extremely meta conceit that it's a biography of memory that's filled with untruths, we as readers never got into the weeds on what was real and what was not. It's clearly a fairy tale from the first sentences, and the consistent tone -- held together by poetic description and lack of linear plot progression -- allowed us to stop worrying about the ambiguous structure and enjoy the ride. It's a touching tribute to Chabon's grandparents, and just whimsical enough to be a fun ride without losing the edge and truth to principle (not so much facts) that make the book feel like it has stakes. The grandmother in particular as someone who bewitches with secret stories was just a priceless character. Overall, Chabon delivered on expectation with this book, insofar as he made a biography that defied the expectations of both a traditional biography and of a subversion of the truthfulness of the biographic form.