Halcyon

December 1, 2022

In an alternative 2004 Virginia, with Al Gore as president, Ackerman's recently divorced narrator is living at the estate of World War II hero Robert Ableson. Ableson is supposedly dead, but there's evidence that he's not--and that scientists funded by the government have discovered a cure for death. From National Book Award winner Ackerman, following his coauthored 2034; with a 40,000-copy first printing.

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March 13, 2023
In this thought-provoking alternate history from Ackerman (2034), Bill Clinton resigns after his 1998 impeachment and Al Gore, as president, funds genetic research on human resurrection. Robert Ableson, a prominent attorney, is a successful test case of the Lazarus treatment, having been brought back to life after dying from pneumonia. The narrator, historian Martin Neumann, has been living in a cottage on Ableson’s estate while working on a book about the Civil War. The genetic revolution coincides with a movement to remove Confederate monuments, which bothers Neumann and raises questions for him about how to best understand the past. Neumann also bemoans the country’s “plague of polarization” that persists despite Gore’s decisive action after the 9/11 attacks. George W. Bush is again nominated to run against Gore in 2004, and Bush’s platform includes eliminating Gore’s resurrectionist research. Meanwhile, with Gore’s reelection hanging in the balance, Ableson struggles to adjust to his new lease on life, threatening to undermine Lazarus’s viability. Ableson also surprises Neumann by scheming to squash a student petition to remove a Confederate monument with some lawyerly tricks. Though the monument debates feel well-worn, Ackerman is great at probing the scientific ethics of resurrection. This visionary tale is worth a look. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.

April 1, 2023
A novel of alternate history, life everlasting, and American democracy in peril. In this version of the recent past, President Al Gore has assumed office after a perjury conviction drove Bill Clinton from the White House, and he has his hands full in a sharply divided and polarized country. First-person narrator Martin Neumann is a historian and college professor, on leave to write his next book, "a study of postbellum attitudes on the Civil War...and what the historian Shelby Foote termed 'the great compromise, ' a cultural reconciliation between North and South that followed those blood-soaked years." Foote's interpretation has "fallen from favor," Neumann's department chair tells him. Ackerman wants to explore whether nuance and compromise are possible where others see black and white, right and wrong. His narrator has "become obsessed with the role of compromise in the sustainment of American life," a notion that has fallen from favor as polarized opinions became louder and more rigid. Recently divorced, he's also obsessed with his own alternative histories of what might have been. He's spending his sabbatical on an estate with the ominous name that gives the novel its title, where his landlord is the legendary Robert Ableson, a legal lion and champion of liberal causes, now retired and in his 90s. And very spry, for reasons the novel will reveal but signals in its very first sentence, informing the reader that "resurrection, a new life, had become a scientific possibility." In 2004, when the novel opens, there are all sorts of further complications to the context--Gore plans to pardon Clinton, statues of the Confederacy are sacrificed to historical revisionism, conservatives want to shut down scientific progress. The historian and his landlord both find that their perspectives and attitudes, once perfectly acceptable, now put them on the wrong side of history. The narrator seems to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders, or at least the future of democracy as we know it. A novel of ideas in an age of opinions.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 1, 2023
In a speculative tale in which President Gore is about to begin his second term in 2004, history professor Martin Neumann has temporarily hunkered down to write his next tome in a cottage on the grounds of Halcyon, the home of the esteemed lawyer and war hero, Robert Ableson, who drops by for a nightly martini. However, Ableson is harboring a secret. He is one of the subjects in a successful scientific quest to cure death. For Abelson, the now porous border between the dead and the living creates legal, familial, and ethical concerns. For the broader world, the central conundrum is, who gets to live? And do we all want to live indefinitely? While the future is brought into question, the attempts to remove a Civil War monument from Gettysburg suggest that history is also up for grabs. As he did in his previous work, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War (2021), the prolific Ackerman uses an alternate world for a thoughtful and fascinating thought experiment, one that explores mortality, fate, and the malleability of historical memory.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.