AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, TIME, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Real Simple, and Vogue
"Alice McDermott has always been one of our greatest writers but here she exceeds every expectation. Absolution is one of the finest contemporary novels I've read. It is a moral masterpiece." —Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
“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, The New York Times
"With Absolution, Alice 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
"[McDermott] has taken the worn tapestry of the war novel and turned it inside out, exposing the original colors and throwing the battles and bivouacs into stark relief." —Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times
"Crystalline, searching . . . McDermott spins gold from sensuous details . . . Beautifully conceived and executed, Absolution stares down the assumptions and loyalties that cage us all." —Hamilton Cain, The Washington Post
"It's futile to predict where a great writer's boundless imagination will take us and, as Absolution affirms, McDermott is a great writer . . . McDermott possesses the rare ability to evoke and enter bygone worlds—pre-Vatican II Catholicism, pre-feminist-movement marriages—without condescending to them. She understands that the powerhouses can dominate the helpmeets. She also understands that playing God is the role of a lifetime—and every human actor should turn it down." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
"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." —Adrienne Westenfeld, Esquire
"Powerful . . . Sharp-eyed . . . [Absolution] addresses the question of forgiveness on both a personal and political level. Few writers have written about moral qualms with such sensitivity." —Heller McAlpin, The Christian Science Monitor
"Evocative and masterly . . . McDermott captures the convolutions of social dynamics and the mutability of memory with brilliant aplomb and attention to detail." —Sharlene Teo, The Guardian
“A work of consistently beautiful prose . . . McDermott, who can easily build dramatic urgency out of even the most mundane tasks, evokes an eerie sense of instability and future implosion . . . The question of how to help others—and how much it costs to do so . . . is ever-present for Charlene and Patricia, who maintain, in the brief time when their lives overlap, a bizarre, conflicted, co-dependent friendship that is utterly fascinating.” —Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"For more than 40 years, McDermott’s deep understanding of human nature and wizardry in creating characters has been the seedbed of one bestselling, award-winning novel after another. Now she has outdone herself with an exquisitely conceived and executed novel that explores her signature topic, moral obligation, against the backdrop of the fraught time preceding the Vietnam War . . . This transporting, piercing, profound novel is McDermott’s masterpiece." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Sublime . . . McDermott is a resplendent writer of lacerating insights, gorgeous lyricism, and subtle yet exacting moral reckoning, here illuminating shades of good and evil within a bubble of Western privilege and prejudice in a country on the brink of war, concentrating the inane and cruel misogyny women faced in Barbie, that freshly energized icon of female paradox and power.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist (Starred Review)
"Damning and dazzling, this is the story of a Vietnam we never got in history class—a story of innocence lost, the bounds of womanhood tested, and our nation held to account." —Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily
11/03/2023
Returning to fiction after What About the Baby?, McDermott focuses on characterization. Young newlywed Patricia and little Rainey meet in Saigon in 1963 at a garden party hosted by Rainey's mother, Charlene. It is Patricia's introduction to the world of American high-society wives. With the assistance of some U.S. military personnel, Charlene draws Patricia into her black-market activities involving a Vietnamese children's hospital and a leprosarium. Charlene's imperious treatment of the Vietnamese women in her employ further strains the women's relationship. Sixty years later, Rainey tracks down Patricia to ask her for the full story of Charlene's secretive influence over whomever she met. Charlene was the catalyst both for Patricia's metamorphosis from a naive dewy-eyed "helpmeet" to tougher pragmatic independent woman and for Rainey's transition from a troubled adolescent to a happily married wife and mother. VERDICT National Book Award winner McDermott frames this exquisite novel (a recent Barnes & Noble book club pick) against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Social class, awakening feminist consciousness, the bladed side of "good works," and the power of one seemingly small event that changes lives forever are perfectly revealed in this correspondence between two women, connected over six decades by their shared experience.—Beth E. Andersen
