Publisher's Synopsis
Annalee Pearse is a pregnant 16-year-old placed in a corrective center run by nuns for failing to cooperate with authorities. It isn’t long, however, before she rebels, breaking the jaw of one of the sisters with a powerful right punch and fleeing with her newborn son Daniel. Thus begins this modern odyssey of the search for knowledge and understanding, symbolized by a strange diamond sphere—supposedly the Philosopher’s Stone—kept under guard by the U.S. government. Daniel Pearse, now an orphan taken in by the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws, has to follow its trail by applying the lessons of his teachers in a world in which revenge, betrayal, revolution, hallucinogens, magic, and murder are par for the course. Deeply absorbing, the novel will make readers squirm with laughter at the same time as it exposes them to feelings of the most desolate sadness. This edition features a foreword by National Book Award–winning author Thomas Pynchon.
