Eat the Document A Novel

In the 1970s, Bobby Desoto and Mary Whittaker -- passionate, idealistic, and in love -- design a series of radical protests against the Vietnam War. When one action goes wrong, the course of their lives is forever changed. The two must erase their past, forge new identities, and never see each other again.Now it is the 1990s. Mary lives in the suburbs with her fifteen-year-old son, who spends hours immersed in the music of his mother's generation -- and she has no idea whether Bobby is alive or dead.An ambitious and powerful story about idealism, passion, and sacrifice,Eat the Documentshifts between the underground movement of the 1970s and the echoes and consequences of that movement in the1990s. It is a riveting portrait of two eras and one of the most provocative and compelling novels of recent years.

Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others; Stone Arabia, A National Books Critics Circle Award finalist; and Eat the Document, a finalist for the National Book Award. Spiotta is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel is Wayward. She lives in Syracuse, New York.