Prisoners

by Wayne Karlin

Book Overview

Central to Wayne Karlin's novel Prisoners is the story of Kiet, a runaway teenage orphan from Vietnam who is seeking her Black father and whose flight impinges upon the lives of several other characters, many of them Vietnam War veterans. The drama of the interlinking stories illuminates the "seepage of history" and examines the "crimes of war and family and skin" in the Tidewater region in Maryland. Karlin unpeels their histories like an onion,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 188068456X
• ISBN13: 9781880684566
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Curbstone Press
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Review Quotes

"Though more books have been written about Vietnam than any other war, Karlin moves himself into the upper echelon of this vast list of authors with this story of Kiet-Keisha. In terms of giving authentic, literary substance, he belongs with the other giants of his genre. Moreover, his prose is as richly poetic and resonating as Walt Whitman." --American Book Review"Karlin is one of the most gifted, passionate, and powerful writers of his generation." --George Garrett, in choosing PRISONERS as one of the most notable books of 1998 in the Dictionary of Literary Biography."As the novel weaves characters and their voices in and out and moves toward a shattering climax in which age-old sin and horror come to bear on contemporary life, the reader realizes that the story of a young girl's search for a lost father is really the story of the world America has created. It is a dark-laces nightmare vision that still, ironically, has room for salvation." --Multicultural Review"PRISONERS is the kind of novel which tells the rest of us what fiction can do when it is at its very best." --Fred D'Aguiar, Winner of the Whitbread Prize for The Longest Memory.