He lost the love of his life. Now, he has just one chance to find her.
Hot on the heels of the incendiary Jarhead -- a literary and silver screen sensation -- comes this, Anthony Swofford's debut fiction novel. It's a mysterious, beautiful and elegant story of lost love and lost youth -- and the battle to rediscover both.
1989. Severin Boxx, 17, lives on Yokota, an enormous American Air Force base located just outside of Tokyo. A muscular, handsome high school football star and the son of a celebrated colonel, Severin could have any girl he chooses. But he doesn't want them; he wants Virginia Kindwell -- daughter of the base's general -- a sophisticated, wise and decidedly uninterested young woman of "hafu" origin: half-American and half-Japanese. She lives a twilight existence, ignoring her father's demands and becoming involved with the criminal underworld surrounding Exit A -- one of the many doorways into the Hajima railway station on the outskirts of the base; a place of filthy neon lights, movement, anonymity, profanity and vice.
Virginia and Severin slowly become entangled, but theirs is not a youthful romance -- the long shadows of the Second World War threaten to engulf them, with the tensions between America and Japan over the use of nuclear weapons still very much in the air. Sure enough, while preparing to enter a new level of criminality beneath the watch of a sinister gang, Virginia simply disappears -- and a heartbroken, confused and terrified Severin must go on with his life alone.
2006. Seventeen years have passed, and Severin is now an emotionally fragile thirty something, unhappily married in Chicago and lamenting a youth marked by tragedy. The emptiness is shattered when he receives a postcard from Colonel Kindwell, now dying in a hospital in Vietnam, asking Severin to find Virginia before he dies. Dropping what little life he has, Severin travels to Vietnam to meet Kindwell, agrees to his request, and then sets off on a journey back into another country -- the past, his past, in Japan, Tokyo and in the area where his love was lost: Exit A. It is a voyage fraught with danger, laden with memories and lit by hope, and as Severin moves closer to discovering exactly what happened to Virginia, he also finds a possibility for redemption and a second chance. But it is a second chance that will take a sacrifice and Severin Boxx does not yet know exactly what it is that needs to be taken...
A tangled, erotic and absorbing first novel, Exit A is that rarest of gems: a triumphant fiction debut, gloriously celebrating the underbelly of life where, just sometimes, the one thing necessary to save a person is love.
