Lightning on the Sun (First Edition)

Bingham, Robert

ISBN 10: 0385488564 / ISBN 13: 9780385488563

Published by Doubleday, New York, 2000

About this Item

Doubleday, New York, 2000. First edition. First printing. Fine in a fine dust jacket. A tight, clean copy with price ($23.95) intact on front flap. Comes with archival-quality dust jacket protector. Author of the short story collection Pure Slaughter Value and the posthumous novel Lightning on the Sun. The author died six months before publication due to a heroin overdose. In Bingham's honor, the PEN American Center has established the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, which awards $25,000 to the most exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work represents distinguished literary achievement. F3700.

Seller Inventory # F3700-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Lightning on the Sun (First Edition)
• Publisher: Doubleday, New York
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385488564
• ISBN 13: 9780385488563
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

About this title

Synopsis

Asher is in trouble. He's washed up in Phnom Penh, the UNESCO monument-preservation work has dried up, and he's at the end of his spiritual and financial ropes. But highest-quality heroin is wonderfully cheap in this dangerous and corrupt part of the world.

So with funds borrowed from the loan-sharking massage parlor owner Mr. Hawk and the aid of journalist and "citizen" Reese as an unwitting mule, he plans to move some weight to New York, where supply will happily meet demand.

His partner in this plan is Julie, his once and future love, a beautiful Harvard-educated dabbler in trendy nihilism and fashionable marginalization, currently working behind the bar at Stopless, a downtown strip club. It's all been carefully worked out, but when Julie decides to improvise, the plans swiftly and dangerously unravel in ways that will put the lives of these three complexly flawed young Americans in mortal danger.

Robert Bingham's Lightning on the Sun is a beautifully plotted and written novel with the fast-paced suspense of a thriller and the moral resonance and exotic setting of one of Graham Greene's classic works. The novel's sense of place, whether steamy Phnom Penh or bustling New York or a leafy New England prep school, is unerring, as is its sense of postmodern moral compromise and the disillusioning ways of the world. It offers an exhilarating read; the literary legacy of one of his generation's most gifted writers.

About the Author

Robert Bingham was the author of the highly praised short story collection Pure Slaughter Value. He held an M.F.A. from Columbia and was a founding editor of the literary magazine Open City. His fiction and nonfiction appeared in The New Yorker, and he worked for two years as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily. He died in 1999.