“Gripping, straight-up, no-nonsense stories about American soldiers and their families. . . simple, tough, and true.”—The New York Times
“Prose that's brave and honest.”—People
“Terrific. . . and terrifically illuminating.”—The Washington Post

An award-winning story collection from the author of The Confusion of Languages.
Through...

As her husband's obsessions with science take a darker turn on the eve of World War II, Margaret Mayfield is forced to consider the life she has so carefully constructed.

"The story of the indomitable American POWs who endured "Alcatraz," the Hanoi prison camp where North Vietnam locked its most dangerous and subversive prisoners, and the wives who fought to bring them home. During the Vietnam War, hundreds of American prisoners of war faced years of brutal conditions and horrific torture at the hands of communist interrogators who ruthlessly plied them for military intelligence and propaganda. Determined to maintain...

Major Weldon Penderton, a repressed homosexual whose career is languishing in the monotony of postwar Georgia, becomes obsessed with a private who is, in turn, obsessed with Penderton's frustrated and sensual wife Leonora.