Conscience

Award-winning author Alice Mattison's new novel explores the hard choices a young woman and her friends made decades earlier at the height of the Vietnam War.Decades ago in Brooklyn, three girls demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and each followed a distinct path into adulthood. Helen became a violent revolutionary and was killed in a protest in 1970. Val wrote a controversial book, Bright Morning of Pain, which was essentially a novelization of Helen's all-too-short but vibrant life. And Olive became an editor and writer, now comfortably settled with her husband, Griff, in modern-day New Haven.When Olive is asked to write an essay about Val's book, a work that attracts and repulses her in equal measure, doing so brings back to the forefront Olive and Griff's tangled histories and their complicated reflections on that tumultuous time in their young lives. Things only become more fraught when Griff borrows Olive's treasured first edition of the...