Synopses & Reviews
A major new novel by the award-winning author recently named by Granta as one of America's best young writers.Set at a remote beachfront cottage in the Hamptons one summer during the Second World War, A World Away follows the fortunes of the Langer family, whose oldest son, Rennie, is missing in action in the Pacific theater. As we are soon aware, there is another battle raging at the same time, this one on the domestic front, as Anne and James Langer's marriage begins to unravel. In part to repay her husband for his affair with a student, Anne begins a clandestine romance with a soldier stationed at a nearby base. Yet all the passion and terness she finds with her lover is unable to ease Anne's empty ache from having her family torn apart.
Thousands of miles away, Rennie is wounded in the effort to drive the Japanese from the island of Attu in the Aleutians, as Dorothy, his young wife, gives birth alone in San Diego. When Rennie comes home, his spirit as wounded as his body, it's clear that James and Anne must repair their own broken lives if they're going to help their son heal and bring their family back together. A World Away is a rich, romantic story that has all the depth and generosity of spirit Stewart O'Nan's work is known for.
Review
"A novel of such depth and complexity that it enables us to appreh the wartime world as if viewing it for the first time." (Anna Mundow, New York Daily News)
"Unfolding as slowly as a sultry day, A World Away is filled with rich language and meticulous psychological observations." (Peter Terzian, Time Out)
"O'Nan writes in spare, powerful language, like a poet. . . . [His] gift has always been to make us look beyond the pretty picture, straight into the eye of the human condition. And he does it again here, without blinking." (Suzanne Freeman, The Boston Globe)
"Majestically written . . . In a mere handful of chapters, O'Nan makes this theatre of war as vividly and unpleasantly unforgettable as any battlefield in literature." (Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle)
Review
"Majestically written...In a mere handful of chapters, O'Nan makes this theatre of war as vividly and unpleasantly unforgettable as any battlefield in literature." --
San Francisco Chronicle"O'Nan writes in spare, powerful language, like a poet.... [His] gift has always been to make us look beyond the pretty picture, straight into the eye of the human condition. And he does it again here, without blinking." --The Boston Globe
"O'Nan has a genius...for intricately overlapping streams of consciousness that rove back and forth, creating past and present with fleeting hints about the characters' lives that a reader needs to watch for like clues buried in a detective story." --The New York Times Book Review
"A novel of such depth and complexity that it enables us to apprehend the wartime world as if viewing it for the first time." --Daily News (New York)
Synopsis
In four highly acclaimed novels, Stewart O'Nan has proven himself among the most versatile of young writers, breathing new life into a wide range of literary traditions. A World Away is O'Nan at his most romantic and elegiac. By following the fortunes of the Langer family, whose oldest son, Rennie, is missing in action in the Pacific during World War II, O'Nan brilliantly captures the mood of this lost world and the changing fate of a country aware that when the war ends nothing will ever be the same.
About the Author
Stewart O'Nan's first collection of stories, In the Walled City, won the Drue Heinz Literary Award. He is the author of three previous novels, Snow Angels, The Names of the Dead, and The Speed Queen. His new novel, A Prayer for the Dying, will be published by Holt in April 1999.