* THE TOP 10 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * 'One of the finest contemporary novels I've read
... A moral masterpiece ' ANN PATCHETT 'Her writing has a luminous kind of clarity a grace
and scope that fills me with wonder' RACHEL JOYCE 'Damning and dazzling ... The story of a
Vietnam we never got in history class' OPRAH DAILY ----------------- You have no idea what
it was like. For us. The women I mean. The wives. 1963. Saigon. Tricia is a shy newlywed
married to a rising attorney working for US Navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced
corporate spouse and mother of three a beauty and a bully. The two women form a wary alliance
as they struggle to balance the pressure to be respectable wives for their ambitious husbands
with their own dubious impulses to "do good" for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later
Charlene's daughter spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam veteran reaches out to
Tricia. Together they look back at their time in Saigon discovering how their lives as women
on the periphery - of politics of history of war of their husbands' convictions - have been
shaped and burdened by the unintended consequences of America's tragic interference in
Southeast Asia. Exploring the disaster of the Vietnam War through the lives built by American
wives in 1960s Saigon this is a virtuosic novel about folly and grace obligation sacrifice
and the quest for absolution in a broken world.
