This Magnificent Desolation

Duncan's whole world is the orphanage where he lives. Aged ten, he 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 run-down bar through a haze of whisky and 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. Thrown into this adult world of mysterious suffering, Duncan finds comfort in an ancient radio - from which tumble the voices of Apollo mission astronauts who never came home - and dreams of one day finding his father.

A beautiful, floating novel. Thomas O'Malley writes with grace and style and bravery. There is not an ounce of cynicism here. While most of us remain earthbound, O'Malley allows us to believe that we can, at various times, go to an imaginative elsewhere. Even the desolation can have its own magnificence. O'Malley is a great talent, reminiscent of another fine Irish writer, Sebastian Barry, A beautifully structured work … A moving and deeply affecting fiction which calls for engaged, even obsessive reading. It is a work of great artistic merit, Marvellous … A sensitive depiction of haunted and scarred characters, There is more than a little of the Irish cadence evident in his lyrical and mellifluous prose, This literary novel soars … O’Malley writes shimmering, luminescent prose

Thomas O'Malley is the author of the novel In the Province of Saints, selected as one of the best books of 2005 by Booklist and the New York Public Library. He earned his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and teaches at Dartmouth College. Raised in Ireland and England, O'Malley currently lives in the Boston area.