Absolution: A Novel

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 & mother of three, a beauty & 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 & of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, & discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—have been shaped & 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 & grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.

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Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, & That Night, At Weddings & Wakes, & After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories & essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, & other publications.