A daring new novel, at once timely and timeless, set around an American family and the ever-shifting sands of history and memory and legacy that define them (“An expert juggling act.” —Stephen Markley, New York Times Book Review) Martin Neumann, recently divorced, is living at Halcyon, the Virginia estate of renowned lawyer, family patriarch, and World War II hero Robert Ableson. It’s 2004, and Gore is entering his second term as president, when news breaks that scientists have discovered a cure for death. Suddenly, Martin is forced to question everything he thought he understood about the world around him. Who is Ableson, really? Why has Martin been drawn into the Ablesons’ most closely guarded family secrets? Is this new science a miraculous good or an insidious evil? From pivotal elections to crumbling marriages, from the Civil War to the Battle of Saipan, Halcyon is a profound and probing novel that grapples with what history means, who is affected by it, and how the complexities of our shared future rest on the dual foundations of remembering and forgetting. “An expert juggling act . . . Idiosyncratic and engrossing throughout.” —Stephen Markley, New York Times Book Review “ Halcyon is an entertaining thought experiment, and Ackerman writes with a gentle, graceful style . . . Ackerman delivers a potent critique of the what-if nature of talking about history . . . Ackerman, as much as any working novelist today, is invested in getting the facts of war and history right.” —Mark Athitakis, Washington Post “A blend of counterfactual history and futurism and a way to think about some of our thorniest social and cultural issues today.” —Jeffery Gedmin, American Purpose   “Frightening, funny, and thought-provoking.” —Mark Braude, The Octavian Report “Ingenious . . . Elliot Ackerman prefers challenging questions over convenient answers, leaving ample room for readers to engage in leaps of imagination as bold as the ones he’s undertaken . . . Blending alternative history with science fiction, Ackerman artfully explores several provocative issues that have become flash points in contemporary America.” — Bookpage “Thought-provoking . . . Visionary.” — Publishers Weekly “A novel of ideas in an age of opinions.” — Kirkus Reviews   “A thoughtful and fascinating thought experiment, one that explores mortality, fate, and the malleability of historical memory.” — Booklist ELLIOT ACKERMAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Halcyon , 2034 , Red Dress In Black and White , Waiting for Eden , Dark at the Crossing , and Green on Blue , as well as the memoir The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan , and Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning . His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and Marine veteran who served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C. One Discovery News of the great discovery trickled out: resurrection, new life, had become a scientific possibility. The story ran below the fold in the Richmond Times-­Dispatch on an unseasonably cold Sunday in April. The two narrow columns of text described how a team of government-­backed geneticists had leveraged findings from the recently mapped human genome to regenerate cells in cryopreserved mice. Weeks and even months after death they were resurrecting these mice. I had read about the “Lazarus mice” in a rented guest cottage nestled in the foothills of the snowcapped Blue Ridge. My reason for coming here was to escape, among other things, the relentless binges of breaking news that over the years had quietly subverted and replaced what was once known as “the national conversation.” The history department at Virginia College, where I taught (but have since left) had granted me a semester’s writing sabbatical along with a healthy allowance. After finishing the Times-­Dispatch that morning, I pitched it into the stone hearth at the cottage’s center where a half-­burned back log still glowed; that is, I pitched all of it except the story on the Lazarus mice. I held on to that, choosing to save it for later that day, when my landlord, Robert Ableson, would come around for one of his early-­evening visits. These visits proved a pleasant interlude after tedious, unproductive hours spent alone at my desk. I had rented the cottage from Ableson’s wife, Mary, who was more than twenty years his junior. This age difference, he admitted, had proven quite the scandal amidst the prudery of decades past—­less so now. Mary was an old soul and Ableson was anything but, which caused her to joke that he was, in fact, her younger man. Handsome in a minor key, with clear bluish-­gray e