Absolution

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents Absolution by Alice McDermott, read by Jesse Vilinsky and Rachel Kenney.

* THE TOP 10 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *

'One of the finest contemporary novels I've read ... A moral masterpiece' ANN PATCHETT

'Her writing has a luminous kind of clarity, a grace and scope that fills me with wonder' RACHEL JOYCE

'Damning and dazzling ... The story of a Vietnam we never got in history class' OPRAH DAILY

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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.

Exploring the disaster of the Vietnam War through the lives built by American wives in 1960s Saigon, this is a virtuosic novel about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice and the quest for absolution in a broken world.

Critics Review

Evocative and masterly ... Absolution is a masterclass in point of view and thorny characterisation. McDermott captures the convolutions of social dynamics and the mutability of memory with brilliant aplomb and attention to detail. It is a successful and absorbing portrayal of the complicated interior lives of white American women during the Vietnam war, and the reverberation of their time abroad for many years after
Sharlene Teo, Guardian
This absorbing, beautifully written novel stands out
Daily Mail
Crystalline, searching ... McDermott spins gold from sensuous details ... Beautifully conceived and executed, Absolution stares down the assumptions and loyalties that cage us all
Washington Post
Perfectly captures the manner and mood of that era and the constricted lives that women led
Independent
Enveloping . . . Retrospect amplifies McDermott’s narrative approach; her work lives in its shimmering details . . . The debacle of America’s involvement in Vietnam might easily have overdetermined McDermott’s story, and it is a measure of her skill that Absolution maintains an oblique relationship to the war . . . What difference might it have made, for everyone, if those wives had been given a choice in the decision-making? Without posing this question directly, Absolution leaves the reader in its provocative shadow
Jennifer Egan, New York Times
A firmly feminist accounting of the era’s sins against women from both West and East, this could be McDermott’s best novel yet
Los Angeles Times
For four decades now, McDermott has written one exquisite novel after another, but her latest, a poignant tale of women and girls living on the periphery of the Vietnam War, may just be her masterpiece . . . In this richly imagined novel, packed with unforgettable characters, McDermott soars in a profound quest of moral inquiry
Esquire
Display[s] her talent for luminous moral complexity ...Exquisitely rendered
Mail on Sunday
Damning and dazzling ... The story of a Vietnam we never got in history class
Oprah Daily
McDermott delivers another elegantly written, immaculately conceived novel that immerses the reader in the contradictions and moral ambiguities of the human heart. McDermott is a storyteller who aims for the stars. Absolution takes us there, by way of wartime Saigon, and with a powerful reminder that good intentions can have consequences that jerk us awake over a lifetime. What a splendid, compelling book this is
Tim O'Brien, author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED
Alice McDermott has always been one of our greatest writers but here she exceeds every expectation
Ann Patchett
Her writing has a luminous kind of clarity, a grace and scope that fills me with wonder
Rachel Joyce
Stunning
Good Housekeeping
The moral quandaries at the heart of the book are skilfully excavated by an author attuned to the awful contradictions and compromises of the time ... Over the course of Absolution, McDermott turns this same lacerating intelligence on issues of class, money, race, marriage, infertility and above all, the questionable politics that led to the Vietnam War
Irish Times

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