Two Moons

Astronomy, politics, and romance join forces in this novel from the writer John Updike has called "one of the most interesting American novelists at work."

It's the spring of 1877 in Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Hugh Allison has conceived a secret ambition: to project an image through time and space. But his plan takes on urgent life only when the mathematically gifted Cynthia May enters his orbit as one of the observatory's human "computers." A Civil War widow whose...