A 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver Winner for Biography Against the backdrop of World War II, Joy Passanante’s touching new book, Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father’s Wars, is the saga of a wartime medical unit, a passionate long-distance love, the making of a surgeon, and two first-generation American families. Told through her father’s eyes—drawing on hundreds of his letters to his beloved wife, his four-volume wartime diary, and his paintings—Passanante masterfully recreates his wartime journey and physically retraces his steps more than sixty years later in an attempt to understand a time in her parents’ lives that they’d spoken about very little. More than just a World War II story, Through a Long Absence delves into one man’s past to explore his personal wars: a stint as a child bootlegger, a marriage between newlyweds separated by continents and strained by years apart, and his struggle late in life with his own mind. The narrative propels readers to surprising places—from a freight train through North Africa to an underground St. Louis distillery during Prohibition, from a young couple’s forbidden courtship to the chaos of surgical tents under fire in Normandy, from an underground trove of priceless artwork hidden by the Nazis to Jewish New Year services in Paris a week after its liberation. Through a Long Absence is a love story, an honest look into one man’s life, and a daughter’s moving quest to rediscover her father years later through his own words.

Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father's Wars (21st Century Essays)

Literature & Fiction

Passanante, Joy

Essays & Correspondence

Mad Creek Books

The stories in The Art of Absence explore the complex relationships between lovers, between family members, between friends. What Passanante shows again and again is how the ties that bind can be our comfort, and our despair. Though the overt subject of most of these stories is passion that transgresses the boundaries of marriage and of other familial and professional codes, what the characters act out in surprising, creative, and sometimes terrifying ways are the hopes and unforeseen consequences of the post-war suburban dream of the perfect place, the home that will satisfy every need and settle all questions.

The Art of Absence

United States

Lost Horse Press

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Books by Passanante, Joy