The writing, the descriptions, the setting, the emotional roller-coaster, the characters -- all were so powerful. This author is one of the best I've ever read (maybe second after Dostoyevsky?) at portraying the world of down-and-out people so vividly that it's almost painful to read. In addition, the plot was a page-turner, with unexpected changes.
Tom Lowe's fall was catastrophic-a moment of fatigued inattention while shingling a roof leading to excruciating pain, opioid addiction, divorce and estrangement from his son. Yet Tom still considers himself a worker, unlike his shiftless neighbours in subsidised housing. And he resents the hell out of the banker and adjustable-rate mortgage responsible for foreclosure on the home he built himself.After his car is impounded, Tom stoops lower than he ever thought possible, with a scheme to commit convenience-check fraud. But in digging through literal trash, Tom finds that something new begins to grow: a recognition of common humanity, a self-acceptance…
This book immersed me in a world we don't usually read about in fiction--unemployed, working-class Western Pennsylvania-- with vivid writing, bringing together two very different narrators. I was drawn into the characters' deep relationships. And I particularly loved the "manglement" sculptures that the author invents.
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, L.A. Times, Boston Globe, NPR, The Guardian Author Pick, and Today
Longlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for 2024 Joyce Carol Oates Prize
“A heart-rending book, but also a beautiful celebration of ‘the glorious pleasure of erecting something new,’ be it a work of art or a human connection.”—The Wall Street Journal
From “one of the finest and bravest novelists at work today,” (Vulture) award-winning writer Idra Novey has conjured a novel of “astonishing and singular” honesty (Rumaan Alam) with two…
I loved the many different characters, all of whom were real and complex human beings, and their intricate web of relationships. I also loved the setting -- the little-known world of American diplomatic wives in Saigon in the early 1960s, when they could still be naive about the coming war.
Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Real Simple, and Vogue
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…
When Miranda’s fiancé, Russ, is being vetted for his dream job in the U.S. attorney’s office, the couple joke that Miranda’s parents’ history as antiwar activists in the Sixties might jeopardize Russ’s security clearance. In fact, the real threat emerges when Russ’s future employer discovers that Miranda was arrested for felony kidnapping seven years earlier—an arrest she’d never bothered to tell Russ about.
Miranda tries to explain that she was only helping her best friend, in the midst of a nasty custody battle, take her daughter to visit her parents in Israel. As Miranda struggles to prove that she’s not a criminal, she stumbles into other secrets that will challenge what she thought she knew about her own family, her friend, Russ—and herself.
