Percival's Planet A Novel [Paperback]

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 Lowell's 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,Percival's Planettells the story of the intertwining lives of half a dozen dreamers, schemers, and madmen. Following Tombaugh's unlikely path from son of a farmer to discoverer of a planet, the novel touches on insanity, mathematics, music, astrophysics, boxing, dinosaur hunting, shipwrecksand what happens when the greatest romance of your life is also the source of your life's greatest sorrow.

What makes Percival's Planet' so irresistible is a more down-to-earth human focus brought to the story through fictional characters and events. Byers has the rare ability to break a reader's heart practically from the moment each new character is introduced. Oregonlive.com

The power of Byers' writing will keep readers turning pages. . . . Byers has a gift for capturing the exhilaration of discover. The depth and precision of his descriptions bring his striving, searching characters fully into focus Dallas News

Byers's writing, always lyrical, shimmers and trembles and breaks our hearts. Percival's Planet' a story of earth, sky and bones, of privileglÝ