This Magnificent Desolation

From a writer of universally praised prose comes a heartbreaking and romantic story of a boy’s unique coming of age.

Duncan’s entire world is the orphanage where he lives, a solitary outpost on the open plains of northern Minnesota. At age 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.

Duncan is sure that his mother is dead until 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 whiskey. She often ends her nights in the arms of Joshua McGreevey, a Vietnam vet who works 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.

A heartbreaking, soaring novel, This Magnificent Desolation explores the shifting landscape of memory, the many facets of loneliness, and the redemptive power of the imagination.

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.