Absolution

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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

American womenâ"American wivesâ"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 eraâs mandate to be âhelpmeetsâ to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to âdo goodâ for the people of Vietnam.

Sixty years later, Charleneâs 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 Charleneâs altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the peripheryâ"of politics, of history, of war, of their husbandsâ convictionsâ"have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed Americaâs 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.