This magnificent desolation

Duncan's whole world is the orphanage where he lives.

Aged ten, he is sure that his mother is dead until the day she turns up to claim him.

Maggie Bright, a soprano who was once the talent of her generation, now sings in a run-down bar through a haze of whisky and regret.

She often finishes up in the arms of Joshua McGreevey, a Vietnam vet who earns his living as part of a tunneling crew seventy feet beneath the Bay.

Thrown into this adult world of mysterious suffering, Duncan finds comfort in an ancient radio - from which tumble the voices of Apollo mission astronauts who never came home - and dreams of one day finding his father.