Russell Martin's remarkable first novel brings to mind the wonderful early books of Larry McMurtry, wherein the gorgeous but unforgiving landscape of the American West is evoked as powerfully and majestically as the characters who inhabit it.

Martin's narrator is Jack Healy, a decent man struggling to make sense of the cosmos, and to define his place in it. Growing up in Durango, Colorado, the son of an Episcopal priest, Healy dreamed of journeying to space as an astronaut. As Beautiful Islands begins in 1985, Healy has fulfilled his lifelong ambition, having just returned from a successful space shuttle mission. But there are problems awaiting him back home on terra firma. His marriage has come undone, thanks mostly to the pressures of his career. And his brother, Michael, with whom he was once close, has drifted deeper and deeper into the tortured realm of schizophrenia.

In Beautiful Islands, Jack Healy relates his experiences in the difficult year that follows his flight--a year that brings tragedy first to his family, then to the nation, when the shuttle Challenger explodes high above the Florida swamps. It is a year that takes Healy on a very difficult kind of journey from his own voyage in weightless space, a journey that beckons him now toward a reassessment of his life and toward a kind of tentative understanding.