Exit A: A Novel

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 generals 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 Virginias 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 Swoffords Exit A builds inexorably toward a climax as it audaciously plumbs the legacies of war the wish for redemption and the danger of love..........