LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION
"In this extraordinary novel, Castleberry brilliantly hopscotches from person to person, from era to era, while somehow making all this fancy footwork look effortless and essential." - Jenny Offill, author of Department of Speculation and Weather
A luminous debut novel in the tradition of DeLillo and Egan, chronicling the eerily intersecting lives of a series of American dreamers
whose unforeseen links reveal the divided heart of a haunted nation—and the battered
grace that might lead to its salvation
June 26, 1947. Headlines across America report the sighting of nine
pulsating lights flying over the Cascade Mountains at speeds surpassing any
aircraft. In Chicago, inspired by the news, Oliver Danville, a failed actor now
reduced to a mediocre pool hustler, hitchhikes west in a fever-dream quest for
a possible sign from above that might illuminate his true calling. A chance
encounter with Saul Penrod, an Idaho farmer, and his family sets in motion the
birth of “the Seekers”—a collective of outcasts, interlopers, and idealists devoted
to creating a society where divisions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality are a
thing of the past. When Claudette Donen, a waitress on the lam from her
suffocating family, encounters the group, she is compulsively drawn to Oliver’s
sister Eileen, but before she is able to join the enigmatic community, it has
vanished.
Reunited across the country, the Seekers attempt to settle in the
suburbs of Long Island. One night, their purpose suddenly revealed, a stranger emerges,
and a horrific crime ensues. In the decades that follow, the perpetrators,
survivors, and their children will be forced to face the consequences of what
happened—a reckoning that will involve Charlie Ranagan, a traveling salesman; Max
Felt, a dissolute late-1960s rock star; Alice Linwood, an increasingly paranoid
radio host; Stanley West, a struggling African American poet; Marly Feldberg, a
Greenwich Village painter; and Debbie Vasquez, a Connecticut teenager trapped
by an avalanche of midnight legacies. Each will prove to be a piece of a puzzle
that, when assembled, reveals a shocking truth about the clash between the
optimism of those who seek inspiration from spacious skies, and the venom of
others who relish the underworld—not only via conspiratorial maneuverings, but the
literal unearthing of the dead. The result is one of the most exciting, and
unforgettable, debut novels in recent memory, and the launch of a major career
in American letters.
Brian Castleberry’s first novel, Nine Shiny Objects, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection and was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award. His other work has been published in the Southern Review, Narrative, LitHub, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.
