In the Marshall Islands, an island-nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that was once a testing ground for nuclear bombs, American engineers and programmers are making and testing missiles while their "hosts," the indigenous Marshallese, sweep their streets and clean their houses. Its 2004, the Iraq war is heating up, and 9/11 is fresh in everyone's minds. Following four interconnected story lines; the meltdown of a burned-out cultural liaison who has "gone native" and bitterly resents his role in keeping the Marshallese down; a young programmer who has lost his leg in a reckless solo sailing journey; the struggles of a young widow with two children whose husband drowned in a mysterious diving accident; and the destructive spiral of a Marshallese teenager whose American girlfriend rejects him when she returns to the States, Missile Paradise is an epic, heartbreaking, and satirical novel about the clash of cultures between the Americans trying to realize their American Dream in this seeming paradise, and the Marshallese who are both angered and bedazzled by that dream.
"Ron Tanner's imagination astounds me. It's been a long time since I've met a group of characters as uniquely flawed and uniquely entralling as those who populate his fabulously tragicomic novel: Missile Paradise. You will follow them to the ends of the earth to find out what happens -- and I mean that just about literally."
Julia Glass, winner of the National Book Award, author of Three Junes
"Ron Tanner is a gripping and transformative writer and Missile Paradise is exactly the sort of novel I want to read, stepping away from America to look back at it with a fresh set of eyes and recalibrate the lens through which we define who we are."
Bob Shacochis, National Book Award winner, Pulitzer Prize nominee, author of The Woman Who
"Missile Paradise is a breathtaking example of narrative control, the way Ron Tanner so effortlessly weaves his threads together. This is a unique, complex, and compelling story -- unlike anything I've read before."
