Moonglow is, in some ways, an autobiography of Michael Chabon's imagination

It was a story he heard over the years. He can no longer quite remember when he heard it first, or who told it to him, but, in any case, it went like this: Michael Chabon's great-uncle – his mother's father's brother – worked as a salesperson for an office-supply company in New York. One day, he was summarily fired from his job. Rumour said it was to create room on the payroll for Alger Hiss, of all people, the disgraced bureaucrat (and alleged communist agent) who'd recently been released from prison.

When, not long after the publication of his last novel, 2012's Telegraph Avenue, Chabon sat down to begin work on his next book, the story – "this anonymous, hard-working man, this sad sack who loses his job to make room for a man whose life is on this enormous arc of American history" – returned to him, unexpectedly. Chabon, one of the foremost storytellers working today, in any medium and any language, set aside the novel he'd planned to write to follow this new path. What emerged – the story of a dying man, his mind unfastened by painkillers, looking back on his life; a novel that travels from the streets of Philadelphia to the frontlines of the Second World War to a quiet retirement community in Florida – all "coalesced around this grain of sand," the story of his great-uncle and Alger Hiss.

Moonglow, the result, arrived in bookstores this week.

"When I started Moonglow I didn't know what I was doing, I didn't know what it would be," Chabon says. "[But] even though I had no idea what I was doing when I started, in some ways, I never doubted. I just always knew where to go."

Perhaps that's because Moonglow plucks threads from his previous books and weaves them together into something new. Despite insisting he wants each book to be different from the last (more on that later), those familiar with the 53-year-old writer's bibliography– which includes two short-story collections, two books of essays, a novel for young readers, a picture book, comics, screenplays and six previous novels – will see that Moonglow shares much in common with his past work. The novel's autobiographical elements, for instance, hark back to his early novels, 1988's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and 1995's Wonder Boys. It's a novel that celebrates science fiction and horror, genres that Chabon wrote about with affection in 2008's Maps and Legends. It's a novel deeply concerned with how to be a good husband and father, brother and son, which echo 2009's Manhood for Amateurs. And it's a novel that could be grouped with his 2000 ode to comic books, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and 2007's The Yiddish Policemen's Union – an alternate history in which Israel has been destroyed and the largest Jewish settlement is located in Sitka, Alaska – to form a loose trilogy about the Jewish-American experience in the 20th century.

"This one really is the fullest integration, so far, that I've been able to make of everything that I've always been interested in writing about," he says. "This one is the culmination so far – let's put it that way – for me in the journey to become the writer that I always thought I would be."

Chabon was speaking from Berkeley, Calif., where he lives with his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman, and their children. It was a week after the U.S. election, and while he was still coming to terms with the reality of president-elect Donald Trump, he was no longer "wallowing in despair" over the results. "I'm past the point of waking up every morning [and] saying, 'Oh, darn, it's still really true. It wasn't just a dream. A really bad dream.'" Perhaps to help get his mind off the current political climate, he mentions he started rereading True Grit, Charles Portis's 1968 classic western, twice adapted into a feature film, the previous evening.

"As a reader, I am utterly content to reread a book that I love," he says, giddiness creeping into his voice. "I love [ True Grit] so much, and the thought that I was going to get to reread it made me happy. And now that I actually am rereading it, it's just such a pleasure. There's no parallel to that as a writer … because I would never want to write the same book twice. Nor would I ever want to rewrite a book I've already written. I don't have that impulse at all. And so there's a fundamental dissatisfaction, I think, in my writing self that drives me – almost a compulsion – to put the books I've already written behind me and move on and do something different."

Moonglow is a novel of compulsions – to capture a notorious Nazi scientist; to hunt down a cat-swallowing boa constrictor; to reach outer space before the Soviet Union; to save a marriage; to escape the past. It's also a novel crafted to instill doubt, to blur the lines between truth and fiction, even when it's clear Chabon is making the whole thing up.

It begins with an author's note that reads, in part: "In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to the facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it." Printed directly underneath is a (real) advertisement from the October, 1958, issue of Esquire, showing a toy rocket manufactured by the Chabon Scientific Co., a company that plays a key role in the novel's latter half. Moonglow is filled with this sort of literary subterfuge; footnotes that add a sheen of journalistic vigour; allusions to interviews the author has purportedly conducted with certain characters, many of whom are thanked in the novel's acknowledgments; a narrator named "Michael Chabon."

"I'm not trying to trick anyone here," Chabon says. "I have no desire, whatsoever, to deceive anyone who has not, implicitly, already given their consent to be deceived. And the only way that you can ensure that is by calling it a novel. By clearly designating it as a novel, I'm saying don't pick this book up without first having granted me licence to fool you. That's the contract of the word novel. Once you give your consent, then all bets are off. Then I'll do everything I can to completely bamboozle you. But, presumably, that's why you're here. Certainly that's why I pick up a book."

In Moonglow, Michael Chabon arrives at his mother's house in California to sit at the bedside of his dying grandfather. (To make things even more confusing, this part is based on the week Chabon spent with his dying grandfather, in 1989, when, memories jogged by painkillers, "he was telling me stories I'd never heard before.") In those long, last hours, his grandfather – only ever referred to as such – tells Chabon the story of his life: His impoverished upbringing in South Philadelphia; his deployment in Europe, where he's tasked with tracking down key Nazi scientists before the Russians do (his own white whale is Wernher von Braun, inventor of the V-2 rocket); his marriage to Chabon's grandmother, a Frenchwoman haunted by the war; his run-in with Alger Hiss; his stint in prison; his obsession with all-things outer space; his retirement in Florida.

Even though Moonglow is a novel masquerading as a memoir, one that plays "games" with "readers' expectations of memoir and autobiography," Chabon (the real one) was surprised by the end result.

"What emerged was, in many ways, an authentic memoir – not of my grandfather, but of myself," he says. "The book is, in some strange way, an autobiography. It's an autobiography of my imagination, my imaginative life, and an autobiography of my, I don't know – my psyche."