Excerpt from Moonglow by Michael Chabon, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My grandfather turned to face Miss Mangel. He plucked out the letter opener and laid it on the president's desk. When one of his rages wore off, you could see regret flooding his eyes like seawater. He dropped his hands to his sides.

"Forgive me," he said to Miss Mangel and to the president. I sup-pose he was also saying it to my mother, fourteen at the time, and to my grandmother, though arguably she was as much to blame as my grandfather. There was scant hope of forgiveness, but my grand-father did not sound as if he expected, or even wanted, to find any.

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At the end of my grandfather's life, his doctor prescribed a powerful hydromorphone against the pain of bone cancer. A lot of Germans were busy knocking holes in the Berlin Wall around that time, and I showed up to say goodbye to my grandfather just as Dilaudid was bringing its soft hammer to bear on his habit of silence: Out flowed a record of his misadventures, his ambiguous luck, his feats and failures of timing and nerve. He had been installed in my mother's guest bedroom for almost two weeks, and by the time I arrived in Oakland he was getting nearly twenty milligrams a day. He started talking almost the minute I sat down in the chair by his bed. It was as if he had been waiting for my company, but I believe now that he simply knew he was running out of time.

From Moonglow by Michael Chabon. Copyright 2016 Michael Chabon. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.