NEW YORK, February 6, 2024 — Kristin Hannah is one of the most commercially significant American historical novelists of her generation, and a writer whose relationship with the American reading public has been built, book after book, on a particular kind of trust. When Hannah writes a novel, her readers know what they are being invited into: a historical moment rendered with real research and real feeling, a woman at its center, a story that will make them weep at least once and reconsider what they thought they knew about a decade of American life. THE WOMEN, publishing today from St. Martin’s Press, is Hannah operating at the top of her powers on the subject that has been waiting for her all along.

The novel is about Frances McGrath, called Frankie, a twenty-year-old nursing student from a Southern California family who follows her brother into the Vietnam War as an Army Nurse Corps volunteer. What she experiences at the 36th Evacuation Hospital, the friendships she forms with the other women serving alongside her, and the homecoming that awaits her in an America that has decided it would rather not know what she has seen: these are the substance of the novel, and they are the substance of a story that American historical fiction has, for half a century, largely declined to tell.

The Story America Missed

More than ten thousand American women served in Vietnam. The vast majority of them were nurses, most of them under twenty-five, many of them under twenty-two. They performed triage and surgical assistance under conditions that broke experienced military doctors. They held the hands of men who died before their families received the telegrams. They came home to a country that told them, in ways subtle and unsubtle, that they had not really been in the war, that their trauma was not real trauma, that the men they had watched die did not count as the deaths of soldiers they had known. Many of them were denied treatment at the Veterans Administration for years. Many of them were told, to their faces, that women did not serve in Vietnam.

Hannah’s novel takes that history and gives it a face and a voice. Frankie McGrath is a fictional character, but the war she serves in and the country she returns to are the ones the American nurse actually experienced. What Hannah has done, with the specific gift she has developed over a career of doing this kind of work, is render that history at a scale that will move it, finally, into the American reader’s imagination. The novel is landing in bookstores this morning with an initial print run and pre-order volume that reflects the appetite for the subject. It will move, on the evidence of the early response, into the American cultural bloodstream faster than any of Hannah’s previous novels.

Why Hannah’s Craft Is Doing More Than It Is Given Credit For

Kristin Hannah is often categorized in the way commercial historical fiction is often categorized, which is to say condescendingly. What Hannah actually does, and what THE WOMEN demonstrates with unusual clarity, is more difficult than her prestige-side critics tend to acknowledge. She writes a research-driven historical novel that keeps a reader turning pages at the pace of a thriller. She renders group dynamics among women (a specific literary skill that literary fiction often fumbles) with real precision. She earns her emotional peaks by working the reader up to them across chapters, not by ambushing them. And she takes seriously the reader who wants to feel something and be taught something in the same book.

THE NIGHTINGALE, ten years ago, did this for the women of the French Resistance. THE FOUR WINDS did it for Dust Bowl mothers. THE WOMEN does it for the Army nurse. What Hannah has quietly built, one novel at a time, is a body of work that has restored to popular historical consciousness the women that popular history, and often literary history too, was content to leave out.

Why It Matters

THE WOMEN arrives at a moment when the American conversation about veterans, service, and the specific costs of asking young people to go to wars their country will not honor them for fighting is in an unusually alert phase. Hannah’s novel does not lecture. It does not editorialize. It simply gives its reader the experience of Frankie McGrath, and it trusts that a reader who has spent four hundred pages inside Frankie’s life will not need to be told what to feel about the country that failed her.

This is Hannah’s most morally serious novel to date, and, on the evidence of publication day, the one most likely to become a permanent part of how Americans remember Vietnam. A generation of nurses, most of them now in their seventies, have been waiting for this book without knowing it. Their daughters and granddaughters, who make up the core of Hannah’s readership, will read it this spring and reach for their mothers’ phones.

The Tribune reads THE WOMEN as one of the essential American novels of 2024, and as the book that will move the Vietnam nurse, at last, from the margins of the war’s cultural memory to something closer to the center where she has always belonged.

THE WOMEN by Kristin Hannah is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold. Published by St. Martin’s Press.

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