Possessing no memories of his life before entering an orphanage, young Duncan recites fantastical stories about his origins and is astonished when his singer mother claims him into an adult world of hazy bars, a salty Vietnam veteran lover and an ancient radio that reports on the fates of lost Apollo mission astronauts. By the author of In the Province of Saints. 20,000 first printing.

Recounts the astronaut's life and career, including his childhood, the landmark 1969 moon landing, and his battles with alcoholism and depression after his fame.

Duncan's entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary outpost on the open plains 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, the redemptive power of the imagination, and the possibility of a kind of grace.

In Magnificent Desolation, the Moon is a promising, new frontier for a couple disillusioned with life on Earth. But when they abandon the third rock for the bright satellite nearby and the distance between their expectations and their reality widens, the speaker and companion struggle to adjust. The poems in Magnificent Desolation juxtapose the marvelous wonders of space with the burning questions that plague the speaker's mind. Is the Moon made of cheese? How long can two people survive--and survive each other--on the Moon?