Truth Like the Sun
“Enveloping and propulsive….There is much marveling to be done as Truth Like the Sun unfolds. Lynch captures the excitement of a fair that proudly showed off the world of tomorrow but inadvertently revealed more than it should have.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Book Summary:
A classic and hugely entertaining political novel, the cat-and-mouse story of urban intrigue in Seattle both in 1962, when Seattle hosted the World’s Fair, and in 2001, after its transformation in the Microsoft gold rush.
Larger than life, Roger Morgan was the mastermind behind the fair that made the city famous and is still a backstage power forty years later, when at the age of seventy he runs for mayor in hopes of restoring all of Seattle’s former glory. Helen Gulanos, a reporter every bit as eager to make her mark, sees her assignment to investigate the events of 1962 become front-page news with Morgan’s candidacy, and resolves to find out who he really is and where his power comes from: in 1962, a brash and excitable young promoter, greeting everyone from Elvis Presley to Lyndon Johnson, smooth-talking himself out of difficult situations, dipping in and out of secret card games; now, a beloved public figure with, it turns out, still-plentiful secrets. Wonderfully interwoven into this tale of the city of dreams are backroom deals, idealism and pragmatism, the best and worst ambitions, and all the aspirations that shape our communities and our lives.
Early Newspaper Reviews
"It is impossible not to hurtle through "Truth Like the Sun ... This book is enveloping and propulsive. Mr. Lynch does a seamless job of recasting real events to suit his storytelling. ... Roger Morgan is that wonder of wonders -- an original flesh and blood creation." -- Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"Jim Lynch's addictive new novel is a tale of two cities, both of them Seattle. ... Roger (Morgan), both young and old, takes hold of the book from its opening pages." -- The Seattle Times
"Lynch, however, has managed to stay the course and with the publication of his third novel, Truth Like the Sun, mature into a consummate stylist. ... The parry and thrust between journalist and subject is expertly handled. The obvious cultural touch point for Lynch's novel is Citizen Kane, and as Helen searches for her Rosebud revelation, readers are confronted with the American obsession with ambition in all its tarnished glory." -- The London Independent
"This is a super thriller that effortlessly moves back and forth between the Cold War era World's Fair and the age of the Dotcom buble burst in Seattle." -- The Mystery Gazette
"A dazzling new novel ... Lynch is masterful in contrasting this tale of the same city in two different eras." -- Barbara McMichael (The Bookmonger)
"This is a brilliant book than jumps between the idealism and nostalgia of the 60s and the cynical and cutthroat world of the early 2000s. It is a look at how a city works both now and then. The hands that need to be shaken, the backs scratched and their consequences. It is about wanting to do the right thing in a world where the right thing has shifted and is no longer clear. I loved this book from the opening lines to the poignant, beautiful end. A must read." -- Bite the Book, blog by Jon Page, president of Australian Booksellers Association
Early praise from acclaimed authors:
"Jim Lynch writes of the city where I live with great brio and persuasiveness. The joinery between the two halves of the narrative [1962 and 2001] is seamless. His handling of the light, just-between-friends style of routine civic graft in the 1960s seems dead-on, and his only-slightly alternative history of the city is at least as plausible as the official version. His people live and breathe on the page. I was engrossed throughout." -- Jonathan Raban, Seattle novelist and essayist, author of Waxwings.
"Often funny and sometimes devastating but always to the point, TRUTH LIKE THE SUN reflects back on the 1962 World's Fair that put Seattle on the map. With the keen eye of the journalist he was and the nimbleness of the novelist he has become, Jim Lynch provides a thought-provoking fictional portrait of a city on the make and its somewhat tarnished tribe of civic strivers." --Ivan Doig, author of Whistling Season and House of Sky.
"Truth Like the Sun, read after Jim Lynch's celebrated Highest Tide, confirms the tidal wave of his talent. Set again in the Pacific Northwest he has explored in such depth and variety, this is a city story all the way. Ambition, payoff, anxiety, payback, decadence and revenge dominate Seattle's story during the World's Fair of 1962 and thirty-nine years later, during the crest of the dot.com boom and not many weeks before the World Trade Center--the Other Coast's Space Needle--endured the mother of all collapses. Lynch's power of concentration depends on his respect for quiddities. His detailing of the moment-to-moment strategems of a reporter stalking a political big-foot, and of the big-foot's bravura evasions--the hunt proceeding throughout the storied and exotic environment of any right-minded person's favorite city--is thrilling." -- Geoffrey Wolff, Pulitzer finalist author of Duke of Deception<>