About this item
1943: When seventeen-year-old Juliet Dufresne receives a cryptic letter from her enlisted older brother pleading for help, and then finds out he's been reported missing overseas, she lies about her age and volunteers as an army nurse to find him. Juliet is thrust into the bloody chaos of a field hospital, where she is increasingly consumed by the plight of her patients. One in particular, Christopher Barnaby, a deserter awaiting court martial, may hold the answer to her brother's fate - but the trauma of war has left him unable to speak. Juliet works with psychiatrist Henry Willard to heal Barnaby before the authorities take him away. Juliet and Willard are forced to plumb the moral nuances of a so-called just war, and to face the dangers of their own deepening connection.
About the Author
Jennifer Vanderbes is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a New York Public Library Cullman Fellowship. Her debut novel, Easter Island, was named a "best book of 2003" by the Washington Post and Christian Science Monitor and was translated into sixteen languages. Her second novel, Strangers at the Feast, was described by Library Journal as "an absorbing and suspenseful story about the dynamics of family,generational misunderstandings, and the desperate ways one copes with both the arbitrariness of fate and the consequences of one's choices." Her third novel, The Secret of Raven Point, will be published in February 2014.
Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Atlantic. Her short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Granta.
She has taught creative writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Columbia University's M.F.A. Program, and at the Colgate Writers' Conference. She currently teaches in the University of Tampa's M.F.A. program.
For more information and to contact Jennifer, visit www.jennifervanderbes.com
