Along the Watchtower

(Paperback)

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Description

From the author of Live from Medicine Park, a powerful coming-of-age novel. Set against the closing years of the Cold War, Constance Squires's debut novel introduces the family of Army Major Collins, as told through the eyes of Lucinda Collins-the vibrant, headstrong eldest daughter. Living on a military base, Lucinda feels displaced and isolated. Over time she finds her own tribe through rock and roll, and meets fellow Army brats, GIs, a ghost, and Syd, who knows how it goes. But after her father's final shocking betrayal, the only world she's ever believed in falls in like the Berlin Wall, leaving Lucinda to chart a new path. In spare, heart-wrenchingly beautiful prose, Squires offers us a rare glimpse into the experiences and sacrifices of an American military family. Along the Watchtower is a powerful story that reveals what it really means to fight for the things we believe in and to defend the ones we love.

Reviews

"Constance Squires' "Along the Watchtower" is an often poignant "rite-de- passage" story of a daughter growing up in an Army family. Beginning on a military base in Germany in the early 1980s, Lucinda's peripatetic tale closes during the Desert Storm era, in Oklahoma, where the family--splintered over time--is in a sense restored. Lucinda's trajectory is accented with music and with acts of derring-do, but is also rife with ghosts and lost souls."
-Toni Graham, Author of "Waiting for Elvis", Winner of the John Gardner Book Award

"Set in 1980s West Germany and Lawton, Oklahoma, Constance Squires's compelling debut novel takes both ghost story and soldier's story and remyths these into a unique and fascinating hybrid. With unforgettable characters and a well-crafted plot, "Along the Watchtower" puts the screws to the reader and turns them tighter and tighter. Beautiful, brilliant, terrifying."
-Aaron Gwyn, author of "Dog on the Cross" and "The World Beneath"

Author Bio

Constance Squires is the author of the novels Live from Medicine Park and Along the Watchtower, and the forthcoming short story collection, Wounding Radius. Her fiction has appeared in Guernica, The Atlantic, Shenandoah, This Land, and numerous other magazines. Nonfiction has been featured on the NPR program Snap Judgment, and in the New York Times, Salon, The Village Voice, and others.