Exiles

With Exiles, his first collection of shorter fiction, the author of the universally acclaimed, best-selling memoir A Rumor of War ("It will make the strongest among us weep", wrote John Gregory Dunne) sends the reader on a tripartite adventure. First to suburban Connecticut, where a young blue-collar man on the way to his mother's funeral falls in with an upper-crust couple who lavish attention on him and pull him into unexpected dilemmas. Then to Australia's Torres Strait, where a charismatic but troublesome stranger washes ashore into the thick of a struggle for a tiny island's very identity. Then to Vietnam--vintage Caputo territory--where a squad of misfits plunge deep into the jungle in search of the body of their mess sergeant, who has been carried off by a tiger. No matter the backdrop, Philip Caputo's ear for the vernacular is unerring, while his interrogation of human nature--of the deceptions we inflict on ourselves and others--is unflinching. Exiles affirms the remarkable range, the freedom from genre, of a writer whose "meditations on the love and hate of war were hailed by William Styron as "among the most eloquent I have read in modern literature. From the Hardcover edition.

After serving with the Marines in Vietnam, Philip Caputo spent six years as a foreign correspondent for the <b>Chicago Tribune</b>, and won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on election fraud in Chicago. In 1975 he was wounded in Beirut and, during his convalescence, completed the manuscript for <b>A Rumor of War</b>, a Vietnam memoir that was published while Caputo was in Moscow, back on assignment for the Tribune. In 1977 he left the paper and turned to novels, of which he has written four, plus another memoir. He lives in Connecticut with his wife, Leslie Blanchard Ware.<br><br><br><i>From the Hardcover edition.</i>