Truly Like Lightning
A Novel
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4.4 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times–bestselling author David Duchovny, an epic adventure that asks how we make sense of right and wrong in a world of extremes
For the past twenty years, Bronson Powers, former Hollywood stuntman and converted Mormon, has been homesteading deep in the uninhabited desert outside Joshua Tree with his three wives and ten children. Bronson and his wives, Yalulah, Mary, and Jackie, have been raising their family away from the corruption and evil of the modern world. Their insular existence—controversial, difficult, but Edenic—is upended when the ambitious young developer Maya Abbadessa stumbles upon their land. Hoping to make a profit, she crafts a wager with the family that sets in motion a deadly chain of events.
Maya, threatening to report the family to social services, convinces them to enter three of their children into a nearby public school. Bronson and his wives agree that if Maya can prove that the kids do better in town than in their desert oasis, they will sell her a chunk of their priceless plot of land. Suddenly confronted with all the complications of the twenty-first century that they tried to keep out of their lives, the Powerses must reckon with their lifestyle as they try to save it.
Truly Like Lightning, David Duchovny’s fourth novel, is a heartbreaking meditation on family, religion, sex, greed, human nature, and the vanishing environment of an ancient desert.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actor Duchovny's cinematic fourth novel (after Miss Subways) takes a bucking ride through the 21st-century American West, ranging from Hollywood to religious fervor out in the desert. Former stuntman Bronson Powers has left Los Angeles to embrace the Mormon faith, forging a life with three wives and 10 children on a vast tract of land near Joshua Tree, Calif. But a snake comes into this Eden in the form of ambitious young developer Maya Abbadessa. Determined to buy a portion of the Powers plot, Maya schemes to put the homeschooling Bronson in a bind with the state's board of education. Three of his children end up placed in a San Bernardino public school. The youngest, 11-year-old Hyrum, is troubled, as is his mother, Mary, Bronson's third wife. Having chosen to stay with the children, Mary quickly reverts to her old caffeinated, self-medicated ways of coping. Things spiral out of control, epically and violently, after Hyrum is beaten by a group of kids in a school parking lot, and Bronson, swept up in the righteousness of his faith, takes the boy's fate, and the law, into his own hands. The characters tend to be flat, but the author manages to spin this tall tale exceedingly well. Duchovny's jam-packed page-turner is just waiting for someone to snap up the film rights.
