When You Come Home

When You Come Home is both a timeless love story and a timely political novel set in the year after the 1991 Gulf War. In the Gulf sands, surrounded by death and danger, marine reservist Anthony Bravo has thought only of Lily, the feisty orphan raised in his home. When he returns, their childhood affection flames into passionate love. Both have lost fathers to the Vietnam War, but now, safe and settled, they rejoice that war and loss are behind them at last. Or, so it seems. Soon Tony’s best friend, a career marine, suffers fevers and strange symptoms . . .

Blending war and politics with a human story, When You Come Home takes up a topic rare in American fiction, the First Gulf War and Gulf War syndrome, the disabling illness that followed a third of the troops home.