Scott O'Connor

From Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award winner Scott O'Connor comes a literary thriller about an infamous desert art installation, the cult it inspired, and a series of violent events. Los Angeles, the late 1970s: Jess Shepard is an installation artist who creates environments that focus on light and space, often leading to intense sensory experiences for visitors to her work. A run of critically lauded projects peaks with Zero Zone, an installation at the former site of nuclear bomb testing in the New Mexico desert. But what begins as a vehicle for healing, soon becomes the flashpoint for a violent confrontation between a small group of fanatics experiencing what they perceive as a religious awakening within Zero Zone and the authorities. Devastated and haunted by the events in the desert and the ensuing media attention, Jess retreats from the world. Unable to work, she unravels mentally and emotionally, plagued by a nagging uncertainty as to her culpability for what transpired in her creation. Three years later, a survivor from Zero Zone comes calling, compelling Jess to face down her fears and recover her art--and possibly her life--from the violent cult intent of making it their own.

Zero Zone

It is the autumn of 1999. A year has passed since Lucy Darby's unexpected death, leaving her husband David and son Whitley to mend the gaping hole in their lives. David, a trauma-site cleanup technician, spends his nights expunging the violent remains of strangers, helping their families to move on, though he is unable to do the same. Whitley--an 11-year-old social pariah known simply as The Kid--hasn't spoken since his mother's death. Instead, he communicates through a growing collection of notebooks, living in a safer world of his own silent imagining. As the impending arrival of Y2K casts a shadow of uncertainty around them, their own precarious reality begins to implode. Questions pertaining to the events of Lucy's death begin to haunt David, while The Kid, who still believes his mother is alive, enlists the help of his small group of misfit friends to bring her back. As David continues to lose his grip on reality and The Kid's sense of urgency grows, they begin to uncover truths that will force them to confront their deepest fears about each other and the wounded family they are trying desperately to save.

Untouchable

Scott O’Connor’s novels have been hailed as “astonishing” (Library Journal), and “so insistently stirring, you want to lean in close to catch every word” (The New York Times Book Review). Now, from the author of Untouchable and Half World comes A Perfect Universe, a piercingly emotional cycle of stories in the tradition of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Annie Proulx’s Close Range. Welcome to the often-overlooked corners of sun-bleached Los Angeles, where a teenaged bicycle thief searches for a kidnapped boy, a young musician emerges as the lone survivor of a building collapse, and an aging actor faces the erasure of his past. There, far from the Hollywood spotlight, we also meet two sisters locked in a destructive cycle of memory and illness, coffee-shop regulars whose lives are torn apart by a stunning moment of violence, and the desperate, fraudulent writer whose fictions connect these unforgettable characters in subtle and surprising ways. Sharply observed, exhilaratingly paced, and beautifully written, A Perfect Universe is a masterful exploration of growing up and growing old, loss and longing, identity and deception, and the search for redemption, humanity, and grace.

Ten Stories

A Perfect Universe

A harrowing tale inspired by real CIA operations traces the experiences of young agent Dickie Ashby, who while investigating a group of bank-robbing radicals uncovers evidence of insidious mind-control experiments conducted 20 years earlier. By the award-winning author of Untouchable.

A Novel

Half World

A literary thriller about an infamous desert art installation, the cult it inspired, and the search for a missing young woman that is “cinematic . . . readers will be compelled to start again at page one to discover how O’Connor pieces together his suspenseful, incredibly well–written narrative” (Library Journal, starred review). Los Angeles, the late 1970s: Jess Shepard is an installation artist who creates environments that focus on light and space, often leading to intense sensory experiences for visitors to her work. A run of critically lauded projects peaks with Zero Zone, an installation at the once upon a time site of nuclear bomb testing in the New Mexico desert. But when a small group of travelers experience what they perceive as a religious awakening inside Zero Zone, they barricade themselves in the installation until authorities are forced to intervene. That violent showdown becomes a media sensation, and its aftermath follows Jess wherever she goes. Devastated by the attack and the distortion of her art, Jess retreats from the world. Unable to work, Jess unravels mentally and emotionally, plagued by a nagging uncertainty as to her culpability for what happened. Three years later, a survivor from Zero Zone comes looking for Jess, who must move past her self imposed isolation to face down her fears and recover her art and possibly her life from a violent cult intent of making it their own.

"Until 1955, CIA analyst Henry March was just another faceless company man. But after his partner betrays him, Henry and his family are relocated to San Francisco, where he is forced to oversee a series of insidious mind-control experiments. Each day that Henry spends supervising the hapless men lured into his facility with no idea of what they're about to endure, weighs on him until his identity frays. There comes a point when he can no longer separate himself as the company man from the family man, thus he makes a decision to vanish into the night abandoning his family forever. Two decades later, Dickie Ashby, a young CIA investigator, is sent to Los Angeles to infiltrate a group of bank-robbing radicals claiming to have been abused by a government brainwashing operation, which sounds a lot like Henry's project. While the members of the group cannot trust their memories, they know that they need to find Henry March, and the only bridge to Henry is Hannah, Henry's once precocious, sensitive daughter, who now owns a photography gallery in the city. Dickie finds himself dragged into the stunning legacy of the experiments, torn between doing his job, helping these people he is tempted to believe, and protecting Hannah from all of them, including himself"--

Scott O'Connor

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