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What can make you want to destroy the person you love most?
Putnam
May 2006
Featuring: Iris Sunnaret
336 pages
ISBN: 0399153500
Hardcover
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Fiction
Nineteen-year-old Iris Sunnaret and her three siblings live happily in a family that adopted them after their mother's accidental death. The youngest of the children, Iris has few clear memories of her mother and father, and no reason to question anything she's been told by the adoptive parents she loves and trusts. She believes her world is secure, knowable, immovable. Then history intervenes, in the form of the Vietnam War. Her two brothers are drawn into the conflict, and both, according to the official records, die bravely in combat on the same day. But a soldier who served in their platoon appears on the family's doorstep months later, offering to tell them what really happened. Your younger son saved my life many times over, he says, and the last time he saved me he did it by killing your older son, to save the platoon from being led into irresponsibly dangerous situations. The family-except Iris-dismisses the man as a disturbed alcoholic. She decides to find out what really happened, seeking out other witnesses, researching other official records. The path she follows brings her into the Iroquois Nation, into an Italian neighborhood of a small upstate New York town, and into parts of her own past that she hasn't visited. She uncovers secret after secret, unraveling the picture she once had about herself, her sister, and her supposedly idyllic family life.
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