Moonglow Summary
Michael Chabon

Moonglow Overview

Moonglow is a novel presented in the form of a memoir. The narrator is a fictionalized version of the author, and the frame story entails the narrator’s grandfather recounting his life story in his final days. The scope of the novel stretches from the grandfather’s boyhood in the 1920s to the year of his death, 1989. The book is structured as a series of nonlinear anecdotes, which gradually fill in the grandfather’s life story while also providing details of the lives of other relatives of the narrator. The narrator’s grandmother is the next most important character after the grandfather. The relationship between the grandfather and grandmother is central to the book’s plot and themes. The book also deals heavily with the history of space flight and its origins in Nazi Germany. These topics are of great interest to the grandfather and present moral questions to both him and the reader.