"Alice McDermott has always been one of our greatest writers but here she exceeds every expectation. Absolution is one of the finest contemporary novels I've read. It is a moral masterpiece." —Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
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.
A virtuosic new novel that explores the disaster of the Vietnam War through the lives of the American wives who tried to build lives in 1960s Saigon. From the renowned winner of the National Book Award.
"A masterful American writer." Mail on Sunday
