Halcyon

A chilling novel set in an alternate version of America’s recent past—about two self-made men confronting a world that seems to be moving on without them

Virginia, 2004. Gore is entering his second term as president. Our narrator, Martin Neumann, recently divorced, is living at Halcyon, the estate of renowned lawyer and World War II hero Robert Ableson. When news breaks that scientists funded by the Gore administration have discovered a cure for death, it calls into question everything Martin thought he understood about life, not least his work as a historian. Who is Ableson, really, and why did he draw Martin into his orbit? Is this new science a miraculous good or an insidious evil?

Stretching from pivotal elections to intimate family secrets, from the Battle of Saipan to the toppling of Confederate monuments, Halcyon is a profound and probing novel that grapples with what history means, who is affected by it, and how the complexities of our shared future rest on the dual foundations of remembering and forgetting.