Absolution

"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

"[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

"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