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Simon & Schuster
April 2015
On Sale: April 14, 2015
Featuring: Riley; Mick
224 pages
ISBN: 1476777934
EAN: 9781476777931
Kindle: B00LD1ONEY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Paperback (reprint - April 2016)
Fiction
Spanning twenty-five years of cultural upheaval, moving from
Montana to San Francisco to Saigon, The Given World is a
major debut novel about the effects of war on those left at
home, by an author who is “strong, soulful, and deeply
gifted” (Lorrie Moore, New York Times bestselling author of
Birds of America). When Riley and her parents get the news that her big
brother, Mick, is missing in action in Vietnam, it blows a
hole in the family bigger than any landmine could. Riley
takes refuge in isolation and drugs but a few years later
falls in love with Darrell, a boy from the local reservation
who tells her of his induction into the Army just as Riley
discovers she’s pregnant, at seventeen. Left behind again,
Riley begins a journey that takes her to San Francisco,
Saigon, the haunted tunnels of Cu Chi, and finally back to
Montana. Maybe she is searching for her brother, but mostly
she is searching for a way to be in the world without him, a
way to trust love again. The Given World introduces an extraordinary cast of
characters—including Primo, the big-hearted, half-blind vet;
Lu, a cab-driving addict with an artist’s eye; and Grace, a
banjo-playing girl on a train carrying her grandmother’s
ashes—all are members of a lost generation coming of age too
quickly as they struggle to put together lives interrupted
by loss. At center stage is Riley, a masterpiece of
vulnerability and tenacity, wondering if she’ll ever have
the courage to go home again. “Marian Palaia is a writer of startling grace and sensuous
lyricism—reading her, you feel as if you’ve never heard
language this beautiful and this true. The Given World
deserves a place on the shelf beside the pantheon of
extraordinary war novels of our time, such as Hemingway’s A
Farewell to Arms and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried”
(Jonis Agee, author of The River Wife).
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