A Hall of Mirrors

Rheinhardt, a disc jockey and failed musician, rolls into New Orleans in the aftermath of Mardi Gras looking for work and another chance in life.What he finds is a woman named Geraldine who is physically and psychically damaged by the men in her past, and a job that involves him with a right-wing political movement.Sparked by the group’s ‘Patriotic Revival’, the city erupts into a riot of madness, destruction and death that is a test of all Rheinhardt’s fast-talking survival skills. Peopled with civil-rights activists, fanatic Christians, corrupt politicians and demented Hollywood stars, A Hall of Mirrors vividly depicts the dark side of America that erupted in the 1960s. ‘Stone writes like a bird, like an angel, like a circus barker, like a con man, like someone so high on pot that he is scraping his shoes on the stars’ Wallace Stegner ‘Stone is perhaps America’s most powerful chronicler of post-Vietnam angst, a part-time college professor whose novels are an apocalyptic mix of adventure, politics, religion, violence and death . . . Stone writes fiction full of lurid hangovers from Vietnam and yet manages to give it an urgency which is completely contemporary’ Time Out