by David Means
First published 2016
Eugene Allen comes back from Vietnam at twenty-two and sits down to write a novel. In his fictional America, President Kennedy survived Dallas and rules from his third term. Veterans return from Southeast Asia broken, and the government offers them a choice: undergo "enfolding" to erase their war memories through drugs and therapy, or live with what they've seen. Eugene writes about the ones too damaged even for enfolding, men who escape the system and wander the countryside. They bring the war home, turning their violence on civilians while dodging the Psych Corps, a federal agency that enforces mental health by any means necessary. As Eugene crafts his story about veterans caught between forgetting and remembering, he grapples with his own return to a country that wants its soldiers sanitized and its wars forgotten.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, american-fiction, historical-fiction, war, alternate-history
Vibes: dark, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: America, Southeast Asia, Vietnam
Period: 20th-century
336 pages · Hardcover · Faber & Faber
Content warnings: violence, war