Love & War in California: A Novel

· Macmillan
Ebook
287
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

The Sweeping Novel of a Twentieth-Century California Life

Love and War in California tells the story, through the eyes of Payton Daltrey, of the last sixty years of an evolving America.
The award-winning author Oakley Hall begins his newest work in 1940s San Diego, where his endearing, wide-eyed narrator must define his identity in terms of self, family, and World War II. As his classmates disappear into the war one by one, he becomes obsessed with abuses of power and embroiled with the charming, dangerous Errol Flynn; with the Red Baiting of the American Legion; with the House Un-American Activities Committee; and with the Japanese interment at Manzanar. Nevertheless, Payton, too, must go to the war, where he is a part of the invasion of Europe and that proving of the American soldier: the Battle of the Bulge. After war's end and time in New York, he returns to California as a writer and a seeker, whose old, long-lost love rises from the ashes to show him who he really is.
Hall has been called a "master craftsman" (Amy Tan) with "one of the finest prose styles around" (Michael Chabon), and he has received the PEN Center USA West Award of Honor and the P&W Writers for Writers Award. Coming on the heels of Hall's San Francisco Chronicle bestseller (a reissue of his classic Western, Warlock), Love and War in California is more than a novel about a young boy who grows old. It's about how the passions of youth become the verities of age, and how we evolve as a nation, a country, and a people during times that are all at once turbulent, dangerous, and stirring.

About the author

OAKLEY HALL served as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II and has an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. For twenty years he was the director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine and is the founder and general director emeritus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Hall has published twelve mysteries, fourteen mainstream novels, two books on writing, and the New York Times bestseller The Corpus of Joe Bailey, and his novels Warlock and The Downhill Racers were both made into major motion pictures.

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