Absolution

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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 womens lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.

American womenAmerican wiveshave 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 eras mandate to be helpmeets to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to do good for the people of Vietnam.

Sixty years later, Charlenes 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 Charlenes altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the peripheryof politics, of history, of war, of their husbands convictionshave been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed Americas 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.

Reviews

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, TIME, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Real Simple, and Vogue

"Alice McDermott has always been one of our greatest writers but here she exceeds every expectation. Absolution is one of the finest contemporary novels I've read. It is a moral masterpiece." Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

Enveloping . . . Retrospect amplifies McDermotts narrative approach; her work lives in its shimmering details . . . The debacle of Americas involvement in Vietnam might easily have overdetermined McDermotts story, and it is a measure of her skill that Absolution maintains an oblique relationship to the war . . . What difference might it have made, for everyone, if those wives had been given a choice in the decision-making Without posing this question directly, Absolution leaves the reader in its provocative shadow. Jennifer Egan, The New York Times

"With Absolution, Alice McDermott delivers another elegantly written, immaculately conceived novel that immerses the reader in the contradictions and moral ambiguities of the human heart. McDermott is a storyteller who aims for the stars. Absolution takes us there, by way of wartime Saigon, and with a powerful reminder that good intentions can have consequences that jerk us awake over a lifetime. What a splendid, compelling book this is." Tim O'Brien, author of The Things They Carried

"[McDermott] has taken the worn tapestry of the war novel and turned it inside out, exposing the original colors and throwing the battles and bivouacs into stark relief." Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times

"Crystalline, searching . . . McDermott spins gold from sensuous details . . . Beautifully conceived and executed, Absolution stares down the assumptions and loyalties that cage us all." Hamilton Cain, The Washington Post

Author Bio

Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC.