Challenger Park: A Novel,Used

Compelling and moving[At the storys heart] is the mystery of love and the relationship that exists between husband and wife, parent and child. San Francisco Chronicle[Lucy Kincheloe] is a smart, ambitious woman torn between her career and her familystruggling to figure out what matters to her most. The Washington Post Book WorldA fine, absorbing achievementa stately novel whose emotional precision is matched by the exactitude of its prose. The New York Times Book ReviewEpic in scope but human in scale, a tale of grand adventure packed with individual emotions. Texas Monthly[I]ntriguing and thoughtfulunder Harrigans control, melodrama is stripped; he leaves enough spice to drive the human side of the plot while treating the science with respect and intelligence. The Chicago Tribune'This is an intimate and soulful novel in which Harrigan balances love, family, and desire.' Library JournalRarely does a book ring as true as Challenger Park. The characters are as real as our friends, family, and coworkers. 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 bean art in itself. Wichita EagleHarrigans precision reporting and lyrical writing make Challenger Park an absorbing read.If NASA ever decides to allow a writer on a space mission, my vote is for Stephen Harrigan. San Antonio Express News[A] finely crafted novel that gets to the core of what really matters in the end: friendship, family, and love.Novelists like John Updike, Ann Beattie and Anne Tylerour leading chroniclers of the human heartwill need to make room for one more in their midst. New Jersey StarLedger[Harrigan] takes the welltrod landscape of suburban bedroom angst and gives it such a quirky makeover that the whole business of marital infidelity and family stability seems fresheminently readable. St. Louis PostDispatchFrom the author of the acclaimed and bestselling The Gates of the Alamo, a novel of extraordinary power about what its like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of todays astronauts.At the novels 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 starcrossed 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 sons 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 distantperhaps unreachableher spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigans narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenthcentury Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the livesthe risks, the friendships, the rituals, the trainingof the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an excitingindeed a thrillingnovel 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.