A New York Times Bestselling Author
A National Book Award-Winning Author
Tricia is a newlywed, married to an attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form an alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be "helpmeets" to their husbands with their own impulse to "do good" for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene's daughter reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking account of that year and of Charlene's altruistic machinations, discovering how their lives as women on the periphery have been shaped by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America's interference in Southeast Asia.