You Know When the Men Are Gone—a collection of loosely connected short stories by Siobhan Fallon—is simply an exceptional book, one that you will savor and then pass on to others.
Fallon is the wife of a military man, and she was living at Ford Hood in Texas when she started this collection. And Fort Hood is the center of these stories, as the characters are all members of army families. Only one of the stories in the collection is set (partially) in Iraq; the rest are about family members coping with separation, preparing for deployment, waiting for reunion, adjusting to life alone, readjusting to life together—the Bosnian wife who can’t bear to be separated from both her husband (fighting in Iraq) and her homeland, the woman who suspects her husband is cheating when she discovers a disturbing email from a woman in his unit, the cancer-stricken mother whose teen-aged daughter runs away from home with her young brother, the officer’s wife who has to retrieve her husband (who has just returned to Fort Hood) from jail, the soldier who sneaks home on leave to spy on his wife, the wounded young soldier who returns to a wife who now wants different things from her life, the widow who agrees to meet with the man her husband gave his life to save.
Every one of the eight stories in You Know When the Men Are Gone is a gem. Fallon exquisitely conveys the solitude, the uncertainty, and the complexity of her characters.
One Response to Certain to be One of the Year’s Best