Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

This Magnificent Desolation, Hardback Book

This Magnificent Desolation Hardback

Hardback

Description

A heart-breaking, staggering, soaring novel about war, music, loneliness and the redemptive power of the imaginationDuncan'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.

Information

Other Formats

Save 23%

£16.99

£12.99

Item not Available
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information