Description: "From the best-selling author and National Book Award finalist, a chilling new novel that reimagines the United States emerging from a different outcome in a pivotal presidential election. Virginia, 2004. Gore is entering his second term as president. Our narrator, recently divorced, is living at Halcyon, the estate of renowned lawyer and World War II hero Robert Ableson. Ableson died a few years earlier. Or did he? When it becomes clear that scientists, funded by the Gore administration, have found a cure for death, more and more of life's certainties get called into question. Is this new science a miraculous good or an insidious evil? Is Ableson a man outside of time, or is he the product of a new era? How does America's fate hang in the balance? Stretching from Civil War battles to the toppling of Confederate monuments, from scholarly debates to intimate family secrets, 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 layers of memory and forgetting"--
Review Quotes: "An expert juggling act . . . Idiosyncratic and engrossing throughout." --Stephen Markley, New York Times Book Review
"Halcyon is an entertaining thought experiment, and Ackerman writes with a gentle, graceful style . . . Ackerman delivers a potent critique of the what-if nature of talking about history . . . Ackerman, as much as any working novelist today, is invested in getting the facts of war and history right." --Mark Athitakis, Washington Post"A blend of counterfactual history and futurism and a way to think about some of our thorniest social and cultural issues today." --Jeffery Gedmin, American Purpose "Frightening, funny, and thought-provoking." --Mark Braude, The Octavian Report "Ingenious . . . Elliot Ackerman prefers challenging questions over convenient answers, leaving ample room for readers to engage in leaps of imagination as bold as the ones he's undertaken . . . Blending alternative history with science fiction, Ackerman artfully explores several provocative issues that have become flash points in contemporary America." --Bookpage "Thought-provoking . . . Visionary." --Publishers Weekly "A novel of ideas in an age of opinions." --Kirkus Reviews "A thoughtful and fascinating thought experiment, one that explores mortality, fate, and the malleability of historical memory." --Booklist