Luna, Phoenix, Queen: A Novel

KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST • From the bestselling author of The Invisible Bridge, a spellbinding novel of two college professors harboring potent secrets, the family and friends in their orbit, and an unforgettable, resilient dog named Luna

“I was so taken with Luna, Phoenix, Queen that I read it twice—in part to make sure it was really as good as I thought. It struck me as just about perfect both times. . . . Each chapter, full of drama and incident, packs the power of a well-crated short story. . . . Masterfully plotted, gorgeously moving.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR

Dava and Barr Pennington are both professors at a Midwestern university: fiction writing is his specialty, English literature is hers. But Dava is unhappy in their marriage, and secretly in love with a colleague, Svetlana White. Spurred by their complicated liaison, she spends her nights working on a novel about two women who run a domestic violence shelter in coastal Maine. Though she loves the work and the refuge it provides, the writing becomes increasingly difficult as her memory begins to fail; tests reveal that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s.

After a precipitous decline, she moves to a memory-care facility in a neighboring town. Soon afterward, her husband discovers her hidden manuscript, which he reads with envy, and then with anger, as he extrapolates his wife’s affair from the relationship described in the novel’s pages. Over the next two years he rewrites the novel and publishes it as his own, to wide acclaim. But persistent feelings of guilt lead him to confess his theft to an unlikely party, who leads others to the truth.

Luna, Phoenix, Queen tells its tale of artistic and marital betrayal in a chorus of voices, spanning four decades and four thousand miles. We hear from Barr, Dava, Svetlana, their children, and even Barr’s research assistant, who witnessed Dava’s last days at home with her husband and observes Barr’s recent obsession with Luna, a beguiling dog at a local shelter who holds a mirror up to the soul of every character she meets. Luna, Phoenix, Queen illuminates the power of storytelling and explores the terror of losing the ability to make sense of our world. It is a cry of rage against our vulnerability and helplessness; an acknowledgment of the mysteries beneath the familiar surface of our world; and ultimately, if unexpectedly, a radical testament to love in its many forms.