Absolution - alice mcdermott

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

You have no idea what it was like.

For us.

The women, I mean.

The wives.

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 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 as they do 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 Americas tragic interference in Southeast Asia.

A virtuosic new novel from one of our most observant, most affecting writers--about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.