AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE 2024 MARK TWAIN AMERICAN VOICE IN LITERATURE
AWARD 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.
