<div>Paul Russell's delicately layered, richly textured novels have won him widespread acclaim as one of the finest contemporary American novelists. <i>Sea of Tranquillity</i>, possibly his most ambitious and rewarding novel, traces a disintegrating nuclear family across two tumultuous decades of American life - from the early '60s to the '80s - and is told in a quartet of voices: astronaut Allen Cloud, his wife, their gay son, Jonathan, and his friend/lover. Ranging in time and emotion from the optimism of the first moon shot to the dark landscape of the age of AIDS, <i>Sea of Tranquillity</i> is an extraordinary and compelling novel.<br></div>