This author continues to embroil and fascinate; credibility adds gravitas to any tale and the ability of Swofford to transport the reader to different locations and cultures, then embrace their values, is a true gift. Don’t be surprised if this makes it as a film in the near future, our money is on Jake Gyllenhaal as the lead.
The stunning debut novel from the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed JARHEAD.
1989. Severin Boxx is the seventeen-year-old son of an Air Force pilot who lives on a military base in Japan. He loves -- from afar -- Virginia Kindwall, the daughter of the general who runs the base. Virginia is tough and sophisticated beyond her years, and when she falls in with the Japanese underground her dealings result in her disappearance and Severin is forced to return to America.
2006. Unhappily married and living in Chicago, Severin's life is turned upside-down by the arrival of a postcard from General Kindwall, now dying in a hospital in Vietnam, asking him to find his daughter before he dies. The postcard precipitates a crisis in Severin's marriage, and, cut adrift, he travels to Vietnam to meet the general and agrees to his request. But the search for Virginia will take him back to the country of his youth, and to unexpected consequences for both. Suffused with the same intensity of emotion and facility with language as JARHEAD, Anthony Swofford's debut novel marks the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.
Anthony Swofford served in a U.S. Marine Corps Surveillance and Target Acquisition/Scout-Sniper platoon during the Gulf War. After the war, he was educated at American River College; the University of California, Davis; and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has taught at the University of Iowa and Lewis and Clark College. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's, Men's Journal, The Iowa Review, and other publications. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient, he lives in New York.
