SCOTT O'CONNOR reads from HALF WORLD

Half World (Simon & Schuster)

A jaw-dropping page-turner based on real-life events, Half World by Scott O’Connor, a B&N Discover Great New Writers Award winner, is a riveting literary thriller from an author poised for a long and impressive career.

From its official sanction in 1953 to its shutdown in 1973, the CIA clandestinely conducted methods of mind control on unwitting American and Canadian citizens. This covert and illegal operation, Project MKUltra, made national headlines upon the declassification of thousands of documents in 2001. Inspired by these events, O’Connor came to write HALF WORLD, the gripping story of Henry March, a fraying CIA analyst who conducts secret mind-control experiments in San Francisco. With each passing day that Henry spends supervising the hapless men lured into his facility with no idea of what they’re about to endure, his controversial task weighs on him as he struggles between his duty to his country and his responsibility to his wife and children. When the point comes when he can no longer separate himself as the company man from the family man, he makes a decision to vanish into the night, abandoning his family forever and becoming a CIA mystery.

Two decades later, Dickie Ashby, a young, drug-addled CIA agent, is sent to Los Angeles to infiltrate a group of bank-robbing radicals who claim to have been abused in a government brainwashing operation years earlier. While the members of the group can’t trust their memories, they know that they need to find Henry March, and that the only bridge to Henry is Hannah: Henry’s once-precocious, sensitive daughter who now owns a photography gallery in the city. Tempted to believe that the burglars are telling the truth, Dickie finds himself torn between doing his job and protecting Hannah, as he is dragged deeper and deeper into the stunning legacy of the Henry’s past experiments.

Scott O’Connor was born in Syracuse, New York, the son of an air-traffic controller and a preschool teacher. An alum of SUNY Brockport, Scott is a co-founder of GO Studios, a post-production and motion graphics design firm, and the author of two novels: Among Wolves and Untouchable, for which he was awarded the 2011 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for fiction. He lives with his family in Los Angeles. Discover more about Scott and Henry March at www.scott-oconnor.comand www.whoishenrymarch.tumblr.com.