Two Moons

"Thomas Mallon [is] one of our finer novelists writing about politics (especially those of the 19th century).... The arena in which Mallon does his darkest, most gripping work is not that of the solar system but of Washington's spoils system...Mallon rewards the reader with wicked humor and deep insight.... This is a novel that abounds in rewards." --The New York Times Book Review

"Mallon has a fabulous eye for the people at the edge of the historical picture. In Two Moons he brings together a prodigious amount of well-researched period detail and an imaginative deployment of authentic characters.... The poisonous Washington atmosphere of hateful Reconstruction politics, tinged by the specter of malaria, practically seeps from the pages of the book.... Two Moons is a novel about a quaint kind of homegrown ambition and optimism that is uniquely American. You could call Thomas Mallon either a dreamy scholar or a scholarly dreamer. Either way, his fiction is as lucent as moonlight." --The Washington Post

"The book's blend of brainy repartee, soulful poignancy and literary game-playing calls to mind the work of Tom Stoppard.... Droll, probing and heartbreaking." --Chicago Tribune

"Thomas Mallon's writing sneaks up on you. No verbal pyrotechnics, a one-foot-after-the-other narrative approach--but every so often, you pause and realize that he's been stringing together one perfectly balanced sentence after another, chapter after chapter.... Mallon is effective at evoking a time--not so unlike ours--when rationalism and mystical thought overlapped in unpredictable, personal ways." --Salon