Absolution
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- 24,99 €
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- 24,99 €
Publisher Description
"A breath of fresh air."—BookPage
"Both narrators bring deep emotional tonality...this exceptional listen will foster deep book club discussions." —Booklist
"Alternately gripping, moving, and thought-provoking...this is an audiobook to savor." - AudioFile
A riveting account of women’s 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 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 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 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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The lives of army wives take centre stage in Alice McDermott’s masterful novel. Tricia is a young teacher who accompanies her army lawyer husband to Saigon during the height of the Vietnam War. There she meets Charlene, a resourceful fellow army wife who, along with her young daughter, Rainey, recruits Tricia into a variety of charitable schemes to help the children and soldiers affected by the war. McDermott takes the pivotal but often forgotten people on the periphery of the Vietnam conflict and places them front and centre. Written in the form of letters between Patricia and Rainey decades after the war, the novel is perfect for dual narrators Rachel Kenney and Jesse Vilinsky, who envelop you in the lavish house parties of the army elite and the chaotic bustle of the Saigon marketplace. Absolution is an engrossing tale that’ll change the way you look at a war that still has a grip on the American imagination.