An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons, in the finest tradition of American storytelling.

The year is 1966 and 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 a chain of events that sees him go to work for 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.

Scibona's story of a restless soldier pressed into service for a clandestine branch of the US government unfolds against the backdrop of the seismic shifts in global politics of the second half of the twentieth century. Epic in scope but intimate in feeling, this is a deeply immersive read from a rising star of American fiction.

An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons, in the finest tradition of American storytelling.

About the Author
Salvatore Scibona's first book, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award; and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library, and the Norman Mailer Cape Cod Award for Exceptional Writing. He was awarded a 2009 Whiting Writers' Award. In 2010, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was included in the New Yorker's '20 Under 40' list of writers to watch.

Reviews
A magnificent counterpoint of four generations of fathers and sons... Like DeLillo in [Underworld], Scibona wreaks an epic from the lives of ordinary, supposedly negligible men. Scibona has built a masterpiece. * New York Times Book Review *
[Scibona is] a born novelist: He conveys a world in a detail. Scibona can take us into the broken heart of a child lost in a foreign airport, the shattering chaos of a night assault during the Vietnam War and the quiet intensity of a working-class New York neighborhood... Work like The Volunteer can never be one thing only, upbeat or down. It's teeming, brilliantly. * The Washington Post *
Salvatore Scibona's exhilarating new novel [is]... a searing record of war and the lies people live by... Despite all the destruction and despair, in this novel hope emerges as the wildest high. * Economist *
What perfect pitch, what perfect rhythm. These are sentences that are in love with the world and that make us love the world, too. * The Boston Globe *
Scibona is a remarkable writer and The Volunteer is a remarkable book... It is a war story unlike any other war story, a story of fathers and sons, of family (both biological and manufactured) and of generations of betrayal and abandonment... All of it - all of it - is just so ridiculously beautiful. * NPR *
Salvatore Scibona is gravely, terminally, a born writer - a high artist and exquisite craftsman. Yes his sentences are perfect but not merely; a surplus of dark and tender wisdom, who knows its source, makes his language - and the world - glow with meaning. * Rachel Kushner *
The Volunteer is a wonder right from page one, lovely in its language and aching in its insights. * Victor LaValle *
This magnificent and deeply moving novel by Salvatore Scibona, one of our most masterful writers, has at its heart the simple and compelling tale of a small boy abandoned in a foreign airport and a mysterious 'volunteer' who all his life, without knowing it, is trying to find him. In stunningly inventive prose, Scibona models the world through which these two beautifully drawn lost souls stumble-an infinitely-interconnected and repeating fractal of airplane routes and inscrutable tongues, of arbitrary hubs and meaningless destinations, of escapes and hideouts, of swarming megalopoli improbably wired to pitiful ghost towns such as only America can hide in its empty middle. All this under the crosshatched shadow of the military, for Scibona's portrait of the way we live now is also, necessarily, a novel about war. The Volunteer is so brave, tough and admirable you are on his side before you recognize what you are looking at. He is the good soldier, the man who fights America's wars. -- Jaimy Gordon
Salvatore Scibona is a virtuoso and The Volunteer is a majestic, magnificent, frankly epic work of art. Characters with the most modest, vulnerable lives transform from 'nobodies' into full, precious human souls, steeped in pathos, tragedy, and a seemingly unstoppable heritage of particularly American violence. What tenderness and love they manage to wrest from their lives becomes nothing less than heroic and starkly, luminously beautiful. -- Paul Harding
Scibona's lyrical yet muscular prose anchors this majestic work as he probes deep philosophical questions about family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice... Scibona's greatest strength is his ability to inhabit each character with profound psychological depth to explore their guilt, doubt, and humanity. This novel rewards close reading and deserves wide readership. * Booklist (starred review) *



Book Information
ISBN 9781787330795
Author Salvatore Scibona
Format Hardback
Page Count 432
Imprint Jonathan Cape Ltd
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 667g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 162mm * 39mm