Skip to content
Responsive image
Vendor
Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Weblink
http://scott-oconnor.com/#halfwo …

HALF WORLD

Scott O'Connor

From the 2011 B&N Discoer Award Winner for Fiction, this is a gripping novel about an intelligent but durg-addled young CIA agent, investigating a string of bank robberies that may be linked to a clandestine CIA operation from 1955, created to explore methods of brainwashing.
Haunted and inspired by these real-life events, acclaimed novelist Scott O’Connor has crafted a riveting, tour de force literary thriller that vividly imagines the devastating emotional legacy of such a program through the eyes of one of its more unexpected victims. CIA analyst Henry March, an unassuming “company man” forced to spearhead MKULTRA’s San Francisco branch, finds himself bridging an untenable divide between his devotion to his wife and children—his beloved Hannah and sweet autistic Thomas—and the brutality of his daily task. Torn between duty and conscience, Henry’s own identity begins to fray, until he finally reaches the ultimate breaking point. Amid the wreckage, Henry March disappears without a trace, taking with him the evidence of his sins and becoming the deepest ULTRA mystery of all.

Twenty years later, as the country struggles under the weight of the Vietnam War, another troubled young agent will risk everything to find Henry, protect Hannah, and piece together the staggering aftermath of the crimes before it’s too late.

Hailed as “one to watch” (Los Angeles Times), especially for his ability “to make something beautiful of unspeakable matters” (The New York Times), O’Connor has crafted a stunning, sensitive, and psychologically astute look at the depths to which a government will sink in service of its own power and the strength required of the human spirit to set itself free. Gorgeous and unflinching, Half World is both a page-turning drama and a transcendent celebration of our enduring capacity for hope.

Scott O’Connor’s debut novel Untouchable was published by Tyrus Books in 2011, and brought him the 2011 B&N Discover Award for Fiction. Scott lives with his family in Los Angeles.
Available products
Book

Published 2014-02-01 by Simon & Schuster

Book

Published 2014-02-01 by Simon & Schuster

Comments

An invigorating historical thriller that examines the boundaries of man.

Half World is all in. A taut and suspenseful narrative. Well-wrought flawed characters. Prose that is pitch perfect. The truth is, Scott O’Connor is a beautiful, sage-like, and terrifying writer.

Gripping . . . . Perfectly timed for our debate about drone warfare and domestic surveillance . . . . Propulsive. Read more...

Provocative. … O’Connor writes with vivid descriptive detail and acute psychological insight, as well as flashes of searing, wry humor and occasional moments that simply break your heart. [Half World] is a probing examination of the nature of identity, compromise, and trust — personal and institutional. It’s also a sharply etched portrayal of the quest for truth and redemption amid moral ambiguity. Read more...

Scott O'Connor's Half World is like being granted clearance to classified files about a bizarre and fascinating moment in our nation's history--this is literary suspense of the highest order, and with every page I was intrigued a bit more, horrified a bit more, until I felt I, too, had been brainwashed and found it impossible to stop reading this beautifully written and utterly compelling novel. Now I must read it again. Now I must...

[O'Connor] compels the reader to inhabit his characters' lives. Half World is a stunningly grim and emotionally harrowing read and an astute and evocative portrayal of government paranoia during the Cold War and Vietnam War eras.

O'Connor shows the beauty, the complex blend of dirty truth and high ideals that reveal the human in all of us with an intimacy, elegiac gravitas and deep respect. A strong voice.