Percival's Planet: A Novel

A novel of ambition and obsession centered on the race to discover Pluto in 1930 pitting an untrained Kansas farm boy against the greatest minds of Harvard at the run-down Lowell Observatory in Arizona . In 1928 the boy who will discover Pluto Clyde Tombaugh is on the family farm grinding a lens for his own telescope under the immense Kansas sky. In Flagstaff Arizona the staff of Lowell Observatory is about to resume the late Percival Lowells interrupted search for Planet X. Meanwhile the immensely rich heir to a chemical fortune has decided to go west to hunt for dinosaurs and in Cambridge Massachussetts the most beautiful girl in America is going slowly insane while her ex-heavyweight champion boyfriend stands by helplessly desperate to do anything to keep her. Inspired by the true story of Tombaugh and set in the last gin-soaked months of the flapper era Percivals Planet tells the story of the intertwining lives of half a dozen dreamers schemers and madmen. Following Tombaughs unlikely path from son of a farmer to discoverer of a planet the novel touches on insanity mathematics music astrophysics boxing dinosaur hunting shipwrecks―and what happens when the greatest romance of your life is also the source of your lifes greatest sorrow.