First published 1990
The narrator travels to see his brother, an Army officer battling terminal cancer. What begins as a family visit becomes something far more complicated when he discovers his brother's involvement in military operations that were never meant to surface. As his brother weakens, secrets about covert missions emerge alongside painful family history. The narrator must navigate his brother's hidden world while wrestling with his own messy existence. The hospital visits reveal not just a man dying of disease, but a soldier carrying the weight of classified actions. Between them lies a lifetime of unspoken tensions and different choices. The narrator finds himself pulled into his brother's clandestine past even as he struggles to make sense of his own chaotic present. What unfolds is a reckoning between two brothers whose lives took vastly different paths, united now only by blood and the approach of death.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, military-fiction, 21st-century, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: brothers, secrets, unreliable-narrator
Period: 20th-century, 21st-century
397 pages · Paperback · Vintage
Content warnings: terminal-illness