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1989. Severin Boxx is the seventeen-year-old son of an Air Force pilot who lives on a military base in Japan. He loves -- from afar -- Virginia Kindwall, the daughter of the general who runs the base. Virginia is tough and sophisticated beyond her years, and when she falls in with the Japanese underground her dealings result in her disappearance and Severin is forced to return to America. 2006. Unhappily married and living in San Francisco, Severin's life is turned upside-down by the arrival of a postcard from General Kindwall, now dying in a hospital in Vietnam, asking him to find his daughter before he dies. The postcard precipitates a crisis in Severin's marriage, and, cut adrift, he travels to Vietnam to meet the general and agrees to his request. But the search for Virginia will take him back to the country of his youth, and to unexpected consequences for both. Suffused with the same intensity of emotion and facility with language as Jarhead, Anthony Swofford's debut novel marks the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.

Anthony Swofford grew up on military bases in the US and Japan, and joined the Marine Corps in 1988, aged eighteen. He was deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Shield in 1990 with the Second Battalion, 7th Marines. On leaving the Marines Swofford attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop.