Challenger Park: A Novel

Challenger Park: A Novel

â€œCompelling and movingâ€¦[At the storyâ€™s heart] is the mystery of love and the relationship that exists between husband and wife, parent and child.â€ -- San Francisco Chronicle

â€œ[Lucy Kincheloe] is a smart, ambitious woman torn between her career and her familyâ€¦struggling to figure out what matters to her most.â€ -- The Washington Post Book World

â€œA fine, absorbing achievementâ€¦a stately novel whose emotional precision is matched by the exactitude of its prose.â€ -- The New York Times Book Review

â€œEpic in scope but human in scale, a tale of grand adventure packed with individual emotions.â€ -- Texas Monthly

â€œ[I]ntriguing and thoughtfulâ€¦under Harriganâ€™s control, melodrama is stripped; he leaves enough spice to drive the human side of the plot while treating the science with respect and intelligence.â€ â€” The Chicago Tribune

"This is an intimate and soulful novel in which Harrigan balances love, family, and desire." -- Library Journal

â€œRarely does a book ring as true as Challenger Park. The characters are as real as our friends, family, and co-workers. The story ropes us in from the start, but then guides us along rather than pulling tight. The writing is colorful when it needs to be, terse when it needs to be, and invisible when it needs to beâ€“an art in itself.â€ -- Wichita Eagle

â€œHarriganâ€™s precision reporting and lyrical writing make Challenger Park an absorbing readâ€¦.If NASA ever decides to allow a writer on a space mission, my vote is for Stephen Harrigan.â€ â€” San Antonio Express News

â€œ[A] finely crafted novel that gets to the core of what really matters in the end: friendship, family, and loveâ€¦.Novelists like John Updike, Ann Beattie and Anne Tylerâ€“our leading chroniclers of the human heartâ€“will need to make room for one more in their midst.â€ â€” New Jersey Star-Ledger

â€œ[Harrigan] takes the well-trod landscape of suburban bedroom angst and gives it such a quirky makeover that the whole business of marital infidelity and family stability seems freshâ€¦eminently readable.â€ â€” St. Louis Post-Dispatch

From the author of the acclaimed and best-selling The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of extraordinary power about what itâ€™s like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of todayâ€™s astronauts.

At the novelâ€™s center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight.

Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her sonâ€™s asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distantâ€”perhaps unreachableâ€”her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.

In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harriganâ€™s narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the livesâ€”the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the trainingâ€”of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an excitingâ€”indeed a thrillingâ€”novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.
Country USA
Brand Ballantine Books
Manufacturer Ballantine Books
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 0345497643_used
Color Multicolor
ReleaseDate 2007-07-31
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780345497642

Country	USA
Brand	Ballantine Books
Manufacturer	Ballantine Books
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	0345497643_used
Color	Multicolor
ReleaseDate	2007-07-31
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780345497642

Challenger Park: A Novel

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