M31
A Family Romance
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A "beautiful and terrifying" novel about family, faith, and the search for home (San Francisco Chronicle), set amidst a community of UFO cultists in middlest America.
As regular guests on late-night radio shows, Dash and Dot are the world's most in-demand lecturers on the topic of UFOs and alien abduction. They believe that we are all descended from M31, the nearest galaxy to ours, and divide their time between life on the road and a decommissioned church in the Midwest. A radar dish on its steeple and a spaceship in its sanctuary complete the modern nuclear-family setting.
When a couple of UFO groupies arrive at the church with their own agenda, everything changes, brought to a head by their strange beliefs and the timeless difficulties of modern life. Dash and Dot set out on their last trip, their ultimate journey, with a destination that no one could foretell. Written with a fevered vividness and immediacy, M31: A Family Romance has been hailed as "a devastatingly forceful accomplishment" from "a star of the first magnitude" (the Washington Post).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dash and Dot, popular fixtures on the seminar and radio call-in show circuits because of their tales of visitations from extraterrestrials from the planet M31, live in an abandoned church somewhere in the Midwest with their extended family and hangers-on. The church steeple has been fitted out with a satellite dish to scan the stars for signs of future arrivals. Into this unusual situation strays Gwen, who believes she was abducted by aliens in a shopping-mall parking lot, and Beale, her traveling partner and sometime boyfriend. Gradually discovering that all is not as it seemsfamilial relationships between the clan members, for example, being particularly cloudythe two ultimately find their own lives at risk as the imbalances slip dangerously out of control. Wright (Meditations in Green) delivers this in fragments, from a variety of viewpoints, leaving the reader appropriately unsettled throughout. Meanwhile, the descriptions etch the particulars of this madness in exceptionally striking detail: the references to a world readers can recognize, seen through the perspective of the fringe-dwelling family, render our world of media and mass culture as alien as the unseen M31. The result is an often harrowing portrait of the chaos that lurks beneath the mundane details of daily life.
