Moon's Crossing
by Barbara Croft

• Hartford Public Library, USA

A stunning, cinematic debut novel set at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Moon's Crossing explores a unique time in American history, when the romantic heritage of the nineteenth century merged with the industrial temperament of the modern age. Jim Moon, an idealistic Union Army veteran, leaves his young wife and son to visit the World's Columbian Exposition, which has attracted America's greatest artists and thinkers as well as its drifters and schemers. Nick, a fast-talking con man, takes Moon to Pullman Town, a model city south of Chicago that is the site of the complex labour strike of 1894. Moon comes to see that the bright future the fair promised is compromised by greed. Unable to recapture his early vision of America, he takes his own life, and in so doing generates a surprising love story between a common young woman and a corrupt policeman as well as a major upheaval in the life of his neglected son.

Kaleidoscopic and fast-paced, Moon's Crossing draws on such sources as the traditional tall tale to present a unique narrative style. Moon's adventures are completely American, and the legacy he leaves is, ironically, more significant than his failed life would have foretold.

Barbara Croft won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 1998 for her short story collection Necessary Fictions and has published one other collection of short stories. An earlier version of Moon's Crossing won a gold medal from the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society in 2000. A native Iowan, Croft has lived in the Chicago area for several years.