From Publishers Weekly
Hospital (Oyster) is a writer of many gifts; her dark imagination, astute insights into societal interactions and the supple beauty of her prose, provide an irresistible combination. This latest novel is an enthralling tale about the intertwined fates of the survivors and the relatives of those who perished on Flight 64, hijacked by terrorists in 1987. The dysfunctional life of Lowell Hawthorne, a divorced father of two children, is rooted in his mother's death on that flight when he was a teenager ("every year, as September approaches, he believes he has put it all behind him, he believes he has laid the ghosts, he believes he will feel nothing but a dull, almost pleasurable sort of pain, like a toothache. And then: shazam, he is a wreck again"). Hawthorne is also tormented by the fact that his estranged father, an intelligence agent, may have had some knowledge of the hijacking before it happened. When Hawthorne's father dies suddenly under suspicious circumstances and Hawthorne starts getting phone calls from Samantha, one of the 40 children who survived the fatal flight (they were released before the plane was blown up), Hawthorne is finally forced to confront his demons. Together, Hawthorne and Samantha go on a dangerous quest to discover the truth behind the disaster and to understand why there was an apparent government coverup in its aftermath. In intense, lyrical prose, Hospital introduces seemingly disparate characters and places and connects them through an elaborate and poignantly tragic plot, only disrupted by the distracting inclusion of overelaborate descriptions of terrorist tactics. In this age of global terrorism, Hospital's sophisticated psychological thriller offers a thought-provoking glimpse of the sociopolitical intricacies of the individuals and organizations that track terrorism, as well as of the enduring personal struggles of those left behind after an attackCopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
*Starred Review* Hospital's last novel, the hypnotic Oyster (1998), used the idea of millennium fever to explore the lure of cults. Drawing again on what we fear most in the world around us, she turns this time to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Lowell is a single father whose mother died when terrorists hijacked an Air France plane she was on in 1987. That event continues to haunt him and the other children of the victims, one of whom, Samantha, is convinced that the whole story of the hijacking has never been told and wants Lowell's help in unearthing it. When Lowell's father, a CIA agent, dies suspiciously and leaves his son incriminating evidence about the U.S.' role in Air France 64, Lowell reluctantly joins forces with Sam. Although it sounds like a high-concept thriller, Hospital's novel is nothing like that. Jumping between multiple characters' points of view, she focuses not only on the horror of the actual events but also on the even more terrible horror of how such events force us to face the world. Much of this novel is excruciatingly painful--especially the videotaped transcripts of the hijack victims' deaths from chemical weapons--but the pain is never gratuitous or sensationalistic. Hospital asks us to confront a world where government "intelligence" has become the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, but she shows us that destruction in the most intimate of terms. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Publishers Weekly starred review
This latest novel is an enthralling tale.


Time Out New York
Unputdownable...does for the post-September 11 era what John le Carré did for the Cold War.


Times Literary Supplement
One of the most powerful and innovative writers in English today.


Los Angeles Times
A writer of high tension and terrifying allure.


Kirkus Reviews starred review
Strong stuff; and accomplished fusion of doomsday thriller and mordant morality play.


Rosellen Brown
This is a rich and powerfully imagined novel of chilling timeliness.


San Francisco Chronicle
In this bracing, visceral thriller...Hospital continually locates, in human events, the unyieldingly human experience.


Book Description
"In this bracing, visceral thriller...Hospital continually locates, in human events, the unyieldingly human experience."—San Francisco Chronicle Janette Turner Hospital's electrifying novel chronicles the lives of two strangers connected by the tragic loss of parents in a hijacked Paris-New York flight. As an adult, Samantha, one of the children set free by the terrorists, has become obsessed with the hijacking. Under the guise of her senior thesis, she pulls Lowell, the son of a victim, into a web of terror, death, and betrayal that he has spent his adult life trying to forget. Hospital's electrifying novel is a tightly woven web of familial and national histories, of sexual and political passions, and of individual and national complicities in the age of terrorism. She probes with astonishing acuity the murky worlds of espionage and intelligence gathering, and the painful meaning of survival.


About the Author
Janette Turner Hospital is the award-winning author of six previous novels, including Oyster and The Last Magician. She is Distinguished Carolina Professor of Literature at the University of South Carolina.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In this bracing, visceral thriller...Hospital continually locates, in human events, the unyieldingly human experience."—San Francisco ChronicleJanette Turner Hospital's electrifying novel chronicles the lives of two strangers connected by the tragic loss of parents in a hijacked Paris-New York flight. As an adult, Samantha, one of the children set free by the terrorists, has become obsessed with the hijacking. Under the guise of her senior thesis, she pulls Lowell, the son of a victim, into a web of terror, death, and betrayal that he has spent his adult life trying to forget. Hospital's electrifying novel is a tightly woven web of familial and national histories, of sexual and political passions, and of individual and national complicities in the age of terrorism. She probes with astonishing acuity the murky worlds of espionage and intelligence gathering, and the painful meaning of survival.