About this item
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 and mother of three, a beauty and 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.
About the Author
Alice McDermott (born June 27, 1953) is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.McDermott is Johns Hopkins University's Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities.Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Wes Washington (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) ], via Wikimedia Commons.
