Truth Like the Sun
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- 8,49 €
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- 8,49 €
Descripción editorial
It is 1962, and the city of Seattle is about to be famous. Roger Morgan, an audacious young promoter, wants to pull off the ultimate coup de théâtre: the World's Fair, rising out of the downtown fog to show the whole nation that the future has arrived. In the run-up to the Fair's grand opening, Roger is everywhere at once - entertaining Elvis Presley and Lyndon Johnson, dipping in and out of secret card games and smooth-talking his way out of awkward financial questions - all under the haze of many a whiskey and the shadow of a looming crisis in Cuba.
Roger dazzles everyone he meets, and is still a backstage power forty years later when, at the age of seventy, he makes a surprise bid for mayor. Helen Gulanos, a journalist new in town and keen to make her mark, sees her retrospectives on the 1962 Fair become front-page news as Roger's candidacy ignites the public imagination. She resolves to uncover the real Roger from behind the warm handshakes and glossy receptions - because even Seattle's golden boy must have something to hide.
Woven into in this city of dreams is a cat-and-mouse-tale of back-room deals, idealism and pragmatism, the best and worst ambitions, and the aspirations that shape our communities and our lives. Hard-nosed yet profoundly humane, Truth Like the Sun is the most ambitious novel yet from the beloved author of The Highest Tide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lynch (Border Songs) offers a new entry into the prominent "city portrait" novels with his newest, which aims to do for Seattle what Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City did for St. Louis or Erik Larson's nonfiction The Devil in the White City for Chicago. The split narrative opens with the unveiling of the Space Needle in 1962 and the rise of its charismatic young architect, Roger Morgan, then ahead jumps to 2001, when the 70-year-old Morgan is running for mayor of the city he helped put on the map. Unfortunately, he's hounded by Helen Gulanos, an ambitious reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer who stumbles upon sordid aspects of Roger's past. As Lynch shuttles back and forth between early 60's idealism and contemporary political cynicism, a host of subplots are explored from the standpoint of Morgan's glory days hobnobbing with Elvis Presley and pursuing capitalist expansion by any means necessary, even if it means fraternization with Seattle's criminal underworld which are then contrasted with Helen's hunger for truth and the Morgan campaign's attempts to bury the scandal in the days leading up to the primary. Executed at a heady clip, the book gets some special traction from posing capitalism under the menacing shadow of Khrushchev against pre-9/11 apathy. But characters like Morgan and Gulanos are ultimately no more than values, their functions and destiny foregone, in service of awfully small stakes.
