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Penguin Press
March 2019
On Sale: March 5, 2019
432 pages
ISBN: 0525558527
EAN: 9780525558521
Kindle: B07DN3B2CX
Hardcover / e-Book
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Literature and Fiction | Multicultural African-American
A long-awaited new novel from a National Book Award
Finalist, the epic story of a restless young man who is
captured during the Vietnam War and pressed into service for
a clandestine branch of the United States government A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his
father at an international airport, with only the clothes on
his back and a handful of money jammed in the pocket of his
coat. So begins The Volunteer. But in order to
understand this heartbreaking and indefensible decision, the
story must return to the moment, decades earlier, when a
young man named Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in
the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking
definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in
motion an unimaginable chain of events, which sees him go to
work for insidious people with intentions he cannot yet
grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens,
to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie's path traces a secret
history of life on the margins of America, culminating with
an inevitable and terrible reckoning. With intense feeling, uncommon erudition, and bracing style,
Scibona offers at once a pensive exploration of how we are
capable of both inventing and discovering our true families
and a lacerating interrogation of institutional power at its
most commanding and terrifying. An odyssey of loss and
salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and
sons, The Volunteer is a triumph in the grandest
traditions of American storytelling.
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