Binding: Paperback
Date Published: 31 Oct 2023
'Crystalline, searching ... McDermott spins gold from sensuous details ... Beautifully conceived and executed, Absolution stares down the assumptions and loyalties that cage us all'
- Washington Post
'Perfectly captures the manner and mood of that era and the constricted lives that women led'
- Independent
'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, New York Times
'A firmly feminist accounting of the era's sins against women from both West and East, this could be McDermott's best novel yet'
- Los Angeles Times
'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'
- Esquire
'Display[s] her talent for luminous moral complexity ...Exquisitely rendered'
- Mail on Sunday
'Stunning'
- Good Housekeeping
'Alice McDermott has always been one of our greatest writers but here she exceeds every expectation'
- Ann Patchett
'Her writing has a luminous kind of clarity, a grace and scope that fills me with wonder'
- Rachel Joyce
'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