This story traces the lives of Phil Benson and Katie Doheney. As a boy, Phil tried to summon up an enthusiasm for baseball but his real passion lay in classical music which was considered somehow subversive - not really American, so he used his piano teacher's home as a sanctuary where his musical conspiracy with the universe could flourish. Katie is seen as a victim of another sort of conspiracy - convinced from the first brush of her childhood logic with the real life spectacle of death in a road accident and the image of the Hiroshima mushroom on television. The threat of nuclear holocaust stalked Katie's every moment. Meanwhile Katie stalked Phil Benson and they grew to understand each other's obsessions - Phil's keyboard was Katie's bomb shelter. The novel follows Katie into unlikely matrimony and Phil into the arms of a gun-toting St Louis actress. By the same author: "Faces" and "The Journal of Nicholas the American".
- ISBN10 0349100640
- ISBN13 9780349100647
- Publish Date 16 March 1989 (first published 29 October 1987)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 8 November 2009
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Macdonald & Co
- Imprint Abacus Books (Sphere)
- Edition New edition
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 192
- Language English