Exit A: A Novel - Couverture souple

Anthony Swofford took the literary world by storm with Jarhead, his electrifying memoir of serving as a US Marine in the first Gulf War. Celebrated for its visceral candour and profane lyricism, Jarhead stands today as a landmark contribution to the literature of war. Now, in his bold fiction debut, Swofford demonstrates the same audacious vision in a story that plumbs the legacies of war, the wish for redemption, and the danger of love.
Seventeen-year-old Severin Boxx lives on Yokota, an enormous American air force base on the outskirts of Tokyo that is home to fourteen thousand US soldiers. Just outside the base is Haijima railway station; Exit A is one of the many doorways into this place of movement, anonymity, and sudden disappearance. Around Exit A sprawls a mad neon landscape of noodle bars, strip clubs, sushi joints, whorehouses, sake fountains, tattoo parlours, comic-book stores and alleys - 'the alleys that all lead somewhere, usually down'.
It's here that we first meet Severin, an earnest, muscular high-school football star and son of a base colonel. Severin is mad for Virginia Kindwall, the base general's daughter, who is a hafu - half American and half Japanese. Beautiful, smart, and utterly rebellious, Virginia has become a petty criminal in the Japanese underground. Severin is soon caught up in Virginia's world, and the young couple fall into trouble way over their heads . . .
Like Jarhead before it, Exit A is irreverent, erotic, and more than a little wicked, a tale told in a brooding voice that is filled with the simple human fury of being alive.
Some of the extraordinary acclaim for Jarhead
'Jarhead is not only a work of reportage from a "privileged" observer. It is also a display of genuine talent'
Martin Amis
'Jarhead will go down with the best books ever written about military life'
Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down
'A miniature masterpiece; a classic account of war and the warriors who wage it. Already, Anthony Swofford's literary debut is being mentioned in the same breath as novels such as Catch-22 and The Naked and the Dead'
Daily Telegraph

Anthony Swofford follows his international best-seller Jarhead with an unforgettable first novel -- a powerful story about a youth spent on a U.S. air base in Japan and the gritty neon streets just outside it, where the Japanese underworld lurks and a rebellious young girl finds herself in great danger........

Seventeen-year-old Severin Boxx, an earnest, muscular high-school-football star, lives on an American air force base on the outskirts of Tokyo. Severin is mad for Virginia Kindwall, the base general's daughter, who is a hafu -- half American and half Japanese. Beautiful, smart, and utterly defiant of her father, Virginia has become a petty criminal in the Japanese underground.

Severin is soon caught up in Virginia's world, and together they drift through the mad neon landscape outside the walls of the base, near the busy Haijima rail station, a place of movement, anonymity, and sudden disappearance. Exit A is one of its many shadowy doorways. Severin and Virginia fall into trouble way over their heads and are soon subjected to the enormous, unforgiving tensions between America and Japan. Years later, Severin and Virginia remain lost to each other, until an emotionally frayed, thirty- something Severin embarks on a quest to find Virginia -- and the part of himself taken from him when his boyhood abruptly ended.

Darkly irreverent, frankly erotic, at once suspenseful and emotionally overwhelming, Swofford's Exit A builds inexorably toward a climax as it audaciously plumbs the legacies of war, the wish for redemption, and the danger of love..........