Absolution

* THE TOP 10 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *

One of the finest contemporary novels Ive read ... A moral masterpieceANN 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 classOPRAH 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, Charlenes 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 Americas 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.