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The epic story of a restless young man who is captured during the Vietnam War and pressed into service for a clandestine branch of the United States government.
A small boy speaking an unknown language is abandoned by his father at an international airport, with only the clothes on his back and a handful of money jammed in the pocket of his coat. So begins The Volunteer. But in order to understand this heartbreaking and indefensible decision, the story must return to the moment, decades earlier, when a young man named Vollie Frade, almost on a whim, enlists in the United States Marine Corps to fight in Vietnam. Breaking definitively from his rural Iowan parents, Vollie puts in motion an unimaginable chain of events, which sees him go to work for insidious people with intentions he cannot yet grasp. From the Cambodian jungle, to a flophouse in Queens, to a commune in New Mexico, Vollie's path traces a secret history of life on the margins of America, culminating with an inevitable and terrible reckoning.
With intense feeling, uncommon erudition, and bracing style, Scibona offers at once a pensive exploration of how we are capable of both inventing and discovering our true families and a lacerating interrogation of institutional power at its most commanding and terrifying. An odyssey of loss and salvation ranging across four generations of fathers and sons, The Volunteer is a triumph in the grandest traditions of American storytelling.
"Starred Review. Like the late Robert Stone, Scibona exhibits a command of language and demonstrates a knack for dramatizing the tidal pull of history on individual destiny. The novel accrues real power as its vividly imagined characters try to make sense of an often senseless world. This is a bold, rewarding novel." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Scibona's lyrical yet muscular prose anchors this majestic work as he probes deep philosophical questions about family, identity, belonging, and sacrifice ... This novel rewards close reading and deserves wide readership."- Booklist
"A touch overlong and sometimes perplexing but original and memorable." - Kirkus
"Salvatore Scibona is gravely, terminally, a born writer - a high artist and exquisite craftsman. Yes his sentences are perfect but not merely; a surplus of dark and tender wisdom, who knows its source, makes his language - and the world - glow with meaning." - Rachel Kushner, author ofThe Mars Room
"Salvatore Scibona couldn't write poorly if he tried. The Volunteer is a wonder right from page one, lovely in its language and aching in its insights. Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke is a blood relative but this novel is a triumph all Scibona's own." - Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling
"This magnificent and deeply moving novel by Salvatore Scibona...The Volunteer is so brave, tough and admirable you are on his side before you recognize what you are looking at. He is the good soldier, the man who fights America's wars." - Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award-winning author of Lord of Misrule
"Salvatore Scibona is a virtuoso and The Volunteer is a majestic, magnificent, frankly epic work of art. Characters with the most modest, vulnerable lives transform from 'nobodies' into full, precious human souls, steeped in pathos, tragedy, and a seemingly unstoppable heritage of particularly American violence." - Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Tinkers
This information about The Volunteer was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Salvatore Scibona (born 2 June 1975) is an award-winning American novelist and short-story writer. His first book, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Whiting Writers' Award. He also bagged the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library, and the Norman Mailer Cape Cod Award for Exceptional Writing for the same.
His work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology, Best New American Voices, and the New York Times. In June 2010 he was named one of the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" list of fiction writers worth watching.
A graduate of St. John's College in Santa Fe and of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he is the Sue Ann and John Weinberg Director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Link to Salvatore Scibona's Website
Name Pronunciation
Salvatore Scibona: SAL-vator-re ski-bone-a
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