America Was Hard to Find

  • Author Kathleen Alcott
  • Narrator William Hope
  • Publisher Orion
  • Run Time 13 hours and 40 minutes
  • Format Audio
  • Genre Vietnam War fiction.
Get in the xigxag app
This book is not purchasable in your country. Please select another book.
Pre-order Buy Now £{{ price }}
How does xigxag pricing work?

Listen to a sample

What to expect

Mojave Desert, 1957.

Vincent Kahn is an astronaut in training, living with his wife in the desert. He will go on to be the first man to walk on the moon.

Fay Fern is 19-years-old and working in a dive bar, having rejected her parents' wealth and conservatism. She will go on to become a violent activist and one of the FBI's most wanted.

The pair's brief but intense love affair will have repercussions that echo through the American century, intersecting with the race to space, the rage against the Vietnam war, and the ravages of the AIDS epidemic.

Critics Review

  • Sixties radicalism and the space program are set in fruitful juxtaposition … Displays a sure-handed lyricism

    The New Yorker

  • Alcott is an impressionistic stylist capable of lovely, luminous effects on the brushstroke level of the sentence … Alcott is at her best in zero gravity.

    Wall Street Journal

  • Readers who value elegant style will savour Alcott’s musical sentences and dreamlike pacing … Readers who enjoy literary fiction have a golden opportunity to not just look, but also to really see. Highly recommended.

    Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  • A marvel of compression and controlled description … Fay’s ambition, at the start of America Was Hard to Find, is to make life ‘happen more deeply inside her.’ Alcott’s novel is a finely calibrated machine that does the same for us.

    BookForum

  • [Alcott’s] prose has a way of finding the cinematic in the personal …. Alcott’s narration is penetrating and elegant, but she gives her characters some of the wittiest and most screen-ready dialogue in contemporary fiction.

    Paris Review

  • Powerful…. America Was Hard to Find leaves readers wanting more of this story and everything else Alcott has written.

    BookPage

More from the same

Author

Narrator

Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up to get tailored content recommendations, product updates and info on new releases. Your data is your own: we commit to protect your data and respect your privacy.