From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Revolutionary Road , comes the story of a mother who struggles with her own demons while her son goes to fight in Europe, hoping to become his own man. " Like Breakfast At Tiffany's spliced with All Quiet On The Western Front . Impossible to paraphrase, wonderful to read." —Zadie Smith, bestselling author of White Teeth Robert Prentice has spent all his life attempting to escape his mother's stifling presence. His mother, Alice, for her part, is attempting to realize her dreams of prosperity and success as a sculptor. As Robert goes off to fight in Europe, Richard Yates portrays a soldier in the depths of war striving to live up to his heroic ideals. With haunting clarity, Yates crafts an unforgettable portrait of two people who cannot help but hope for more even as life challenges them both. "Like Breakfast At Tiffany's spliced with All Quiet On The Western Front. Impossible to paraphrase, wonderful to read." —Zadie Smith, bestselling author of White Teeth “Soft-spoken in his prose and terrifyingly accurate in his dialogue, Yates renders his characters with such authenticity that you hardly realize what he's done.” — The Boston Globe "One of America's best-kept secrets.... Keenly insightful, brutally honest ... delivering a swift kick to the heart." — The Denver Post “Yates writes powerfully and enters completely and effortlessly into the lives of his characters.” — The New York Times Book Review Richard Yates was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road , was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, and  Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories,  Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and  Liars in Love . He died in 1992. Chapter One "Commence—fire!" The blast of rifles shocked his ears, right and left; he squeezed the trigger and felt the stock of his own rifle drive hard into his shoulder and cheek, and then he fired again. They were lying prone on a damp Virginia ridge, firing down across a dismal slope of weeds at a simulated enemy position several hundred yards away—a group of crude wooden house fronts flanked by clumps of trees. Gray silhouette targets darted in and out of view at the windows and came irregularly up from foxholes among the trees, and at first Prentice didn't aim at them very precisely: the main thing seemed to be to keep firing, to get off as many rounds as the men on either side of him. But after a few seconds the tension eased off and he became both careful and fast. It was exhilarating. "Cease fire! Cease fire! All right, fall back. Everybody back. Second squad, let's go. Second squad up on the line." Prentice locked his rifle, got up, and stumbled back down the ridge with the others to where a small, painstakingly built campfire was struggling for survival. He made his way into the huddle of men surrounding it and found a place to stand beside John Quint. "Think you hit anything, Deadeye?" Quint asked him. "A couple, I think. I'm pretty sure I got a couple, anyway. You?" "Hell, I don't know." It was the last afternoon of the week's bivouac that was the climax of their training. Any day now they would be shipped out for overseas processing, and the company's morale could not have been lower, but Prentice had begun to feel an unreasonable elation. It pleased him to know that he hadn't bathed or changed his clothes for six days, that he was learning to handle his rifle as an extension of himself, and that he'd taken part in elaborate field problems without doing anything noticeably absurd. A pleasant little spasm of shuddering seized him; he squared his shoulders, set his feet wider apart, and briskly rubbed his hands together in the woodsmoke. "Hey Prentice," said Novak, who had been watching him from the other side of the fire. "You feeling pretty sharp today? You feeling like a real fighting man?" This caused a chuckle around the group, and Cameron, a big Southerner who was Novak's friend, did his best to keep it going. "Old Prentice gunna be a regular tiger, ain't he? Jesus, I'm glad he's on our side." He tried to ignore them, continuing to rub his hands and stare down into the weak flames, but the sound of their bored, easy laughter had spoiled his mood. Hardly any of the men in his platoon were less than five years older than Prentice; some were thirty and a few were nearly forty, and a more surly, less amiable crowd he could never have imagined. Like him, they had all come to Camp Pickett from other branches of the service--this whole training regiment, in fact, was what the Army called an Infantry Re-Tread Center--but there was a considerable difference between his case and theirs. He was a veteran of nothing more than six weeks of m