MASON, Bobbie Ann. In Country. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2014.

8vo. Full green leather. Spine with five raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt-ruled covers with illustrations in gilt. All edges gilt. Silk endpapers. Sewn-in satin bookmark. [x], 247 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published New York: Harper & Row, 1985.

Bobbie Ann Mason (b. 1940) grew up in Mayfield, Kentucky, took her PhD at the University of Connecticut, and published her first collection of short stories, Shiloh and Other Stories, in 1982 — winning the PEN/Hemingway Award and establishing herself as one of the most distinctive voices in American fiction of her generation. Her memoir Clear Springs (1999) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In Country, published in 1985, was her first novel and remains her most widely read work.

The novel is set in Hopewell, Kentucky, in the summer of 1984 — almost a decade after the fall of Saigon, in a country that has still not finished processing what it did and what was done in its name. Samantha Hughes is seventeen years old. Her father Dwayne was killed in Vietnam before she was born. She lives with her uncle Emmett, also a Vietnam veteran, who is developing a skin condition she fears may be linked to Agent Orange, and who moves through civilian life with the particular disorientation of a man who cannot fully inhabit a world that has moved on without him. Sam has grown up without the war but surrounded by its residue — in Emmett, in the veterans who congregate in her town, in the MAS*H reruns on television that seem to make the war both present and completely unreal. She becomes obsessed with understanding what happened, and with her father, the soldier-boy in the photograph who never changed.

Mason's achievement was to approach Vietnam from the perspective of those left behind — the wives, the children, the people for whom the war was an absence rather than an experience — and to find in that perspective an understanding of the conflict's domestic cost that the combat narratives could not provide. The novel's final scene, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, is one of the most precisely observed and emotionally exact closing sequences in American fiction of its decade. Norman Jewison's 1989 film adaptation starred Bruce Willis as Emmett and Emily Lloyd as Sam.

Fine. Presenting as new.

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Catalogue Number: HH000532