Summary and Reviews of Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois

Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois

Resurrection Day

by Brendan DuBois
  • Critics' Consensus (3):
  • First Published:
  • Jun 1, 1999, 400 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Oct 2000, 480 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

A chilling tale of intrigue and betrayal in the aftermath of an American nuclear war, and one of the most inventive novels of alternative history since Robert Harris's Fatherland.

What if the Cuban Missile Crisis had become a full-blown atomic war? So begins Resurrection Day by Brendan DuBois, a fascinating novel of tantalizing, speculative history. The place is Boston. The year is 1972. It has been ten years since bombs fell over major cities in the United States and the Soviet Union. Russia is decimated. Omaha and San Diego are virtually destroyed. Washington, D.C., lies beneath a giant crater lake. President Kennedy, Vice President Johnson, and their families have disappeared and are believed dead. "The best and the brightest" of their administration are disgraced or in hiding. America is a shell of her former glory, a second-rate power dependent upon the kindness of Britain. Martial law rules.

Carl Landry, a young reporter with The Boston Globe, arrives at the scene of a murder. A friendless man, a veteran of the '62 war, has been shot in his bed. Landry begins to suspect that the man has taken secrets to his grave. What was this man doing in the War Room of the White House in October 1962? Who pushed the button that started the war? What is the legend and what is the lie? Who was the betrayer and who the betrayed? And could John F. Kennedy, by some miracle, still be alive?

DuBois has carefully interwoven fact and fiction to create a seamless story of multilayered suspense--an unnerving story of what might have been.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

The Chicago Tribune
What if the Cuban missile crisis had actually led to nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union? It's an intriguing premise cleverly explored in this speculative-history thriller by mystery writer Brendan Dubois.

Booklist - David Pitt
DuBois' tale is a feast for the mind, a what-if story that's so plausible it reads, at times, like nonfiction. In every way, this is a first-rate novel and one that is sure to appeal to a wide variety of readers.

Publishers Weekly
Cohesively plotted and smoothly written, steadily exciting and rife with clever conceits, this is 'what-if' thriller fiction at its finest.

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