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(as of Nov 30, 2024 12:56:28 UTC – Details)
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Real Simple, and Vogue
A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.
American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.
Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia.
A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.
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Customer Reviews
3.9 out of 5 stars
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More titles by Alice McDermott
The critically acclaimed “haunting and vivid portrait of an Irish Catholic clan in early twentieth century America.” (The Associated Press) An ordinary life—its sharp pains and unexpected joys, its bursts of clarity and moments of confusion—lived by an ordinary, but unforgettable woman. Winner of the National Book Award and a New York Times bestseller, Charming Billy is “Alice McDermott’s masterpiece” (NPR). The “beautifully written” (The Washington Post) first novel by Alice McDermott.
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More titles by Alice McDermott
Alice McDermott, “has taken a suburban teenage romance and pregnancy and infused it with the power, the ominousness, and the star-crossed romanticism of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet.” (Chicago Tribune) Pulitzer Prize finalist At Weddings and Wakes is “a brilliant, highly complex, extraordinary piece of fiction.” (Chicago Tribune) As Margaret Atwood wrote in The New York Review of Books, Child of My Heart is “richly textured [and] intricately woven . . . A work not only of, but about, the imagination.”
ASIN : B0BTX6JH7S
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 31, 2023)
Publication date : October 31, 2023
Language : English
File size : 4739 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 369 pages
Customers say
Customers find the story interesting, reflective, and sentimental. They describe the book as an excellent read that brings back memories. Readers praise the writing quality as well-written, fluid, and believable. They also appreciate the wonderful characters. However, some feel the book is dry, uninteresting, and never really sucked them fully in.
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