A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher (9780552998888)

Description - A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher

At a planetarium in Manhattan in 1965, 10-year-old Loren is kidnapped from his young aunt. His abductor, an antiquities collector named Junius Samax, claims to be his great-uncle, and makes him an irresistible offer: If Loren returns with him to Las Vegas, he'll share his sumptuous lifestyle, and the story of Loren's mother, who put him up for adoption shortly before she died. When Loren agrees, Samax spirits him away to his unusual home - The Hotel Canopus, an elaborate mansion filled with a wide cast of eccentrics: a mnemonics scholar, an eight-fingered arachnothologist, a lisping Atlantologist, a Zuni architect, a taciturn meteorologist. There, as he pieces together the tragic story of his young mother's life, Loren slowly builds a new family, and a home. Meanwhile, distraught over Loren's disappearance, his aunt Mala quits college and enlists in the Navy at the height of the Vietnam war. Working as an X-ray technician on a hospital ship in the South Pacific, she meets a wounded navigator named Geza Cassiel, and falls in love. Yet just as she opens her heart, he too vanishes, pronounced missing in action on his next mission.
When Mala sets out again, she begins a restless 10-year journey around the globe, until a chance encounter on a remote island in Greece - at the Festival of the Lost - brings the end of her long search into sight at last.

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