Sea of Tranquillity(1994)

Paul Russell

From Paul Russell, the award-winning author of The Coming Storm , comes the story of a splinted nuclear family - spanning from the optimistic time of the first moon shot to the bleak time of the early AIDS years.

Astronaut Allen Cloud suffers severely from post-lunar depression, and dreams of returning to the far-off world in which he'd finally found peace. His wife's search for happiness takes her from the bottom of a bottle in middle America to Turkey, where she finds spiritual salvation. Their gay son Jonathan embarks on a journey of self-discovery, leading him from Houston to the sophisticated gay world of the East Coast. His acknowledgment of his sexual identity and pursuit of physical and spiritual fulfillment has its counterpoint in a repressed preacher's son, whose desires Jonathan awakens in high school and whose destiny Jonathan permanently alters.

Told by a brilliant quartet of voices, Sea of Tranquillity demonstrates a spectrum of emotion that sweeps from razor-sharp wit to wrenching heartache, from anger and alienation to acceptance and reconciliation.