Luna, Phoenix, Queen

KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST • A spellbinding tour de force from the bestselling author of The Invisible Bridge—a novel about varieties of infidelity, the provenance of a literary masterpiece, and the power of storytelling to shape identity and destiny. "Luna, Phoenix, Queen reimagined what I thought a novel could do. My favorite kind of novel." —Caro Claire Burke, author of Yesteryear Dava and Barr Pennington, professors at a Midwestern university, both harbor potent secrets. Fiction writing is his specialty, English literature is hers. But Dava is unhappy in their marriage, and secretly in love with a colleague, Svetlana White, who teaches in the Russian Studies department; spurred by their complicated liaison, she spends her nights working on a novel about two women who run a domestic violence shelter in coastal Maine. Though she loves the work and the refuge it provides, the writing becomes increasingly difficult as her memory begins to fail; tests reveal that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. After a precipitous decline, she moves to a memory-care facility in a neighboring town. Soon afterward, her husband, alone in the house at night, discovers her hidden manuscript, which he reads with envy, and then with anger, as he extrapolates his wife’s affair from the relationship described in the novel’s pages. Over the next two years he rewrites the novel and publishes it as his own, to wide acclaim. But persistent feelings of guilt lead him to confess his theft to an unlikely party, who leads others to the truth. Luna, Phoenix, Queen tells its tale of artistic and marital betrayal in a chorus of voices. We hear from Barr as he becomes obsessed with Luna, a horrifically injured dog at a local shelter; from Dava as she meets Svetlana for the first time, on a transatlantic flight to Dublin; from Milo, Dava’s son, as he hides in the woods with Naomi, Svetlana’s daughter; from Svetlana, experiencing the loss of a relationship that ended before it could come to fruition; from Evie, Barr’s research assistant, who witnessed Dava’s last days at home with her husband; from James, the Penningtons’ younger son, who makes a startling discovery after his father’s death; and from Milo and Svetlana again, as they grieve the injustice of Barr’s theft and confront the devastation of Dava’s disease. In a narrative that spans four decades and four thousand miles, Luna, Phoenix, Queen illuminates the power of storytelling and explores the terror of losing the ability to make sense of our world. It is a cry of rage against our vulnerability and helplessness; an acknowledgment of the mysteries beneath the familiar surface of our world; and ultimately, if unexpectedly, a radical testament to love in its many forms.

Julie Orringer is the author of three award-winning books: How to Breathe Underwater, The Invisible Bridge, and The Flight Portfolio, which was the basis for the 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic. She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for Fiction and the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and MacDowell. She teaches at New York University and Stanford University, and lives in Brooklyn.