* THE TOP 10 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *''One of the finest contemporary novels I''ve read ... A moral masterpiece'' ANN PATCHETT''Her writing has a luminous kind of clarity, a grace and scope that fills me with wonder'' RACHEL JOYCE''Damning and dazzling ... The story of a Vietnam we never got in history class'' OPRAH DAILY-----------------You have no idea what it was like. For us. The women, I mean. The wives. 1963. Saigon. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney working for US Navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. The two women form a wary alliance as they struggle to balance the pressure to be respectable wives for their ambitious husbands, with their own dubious impulses to -do good- for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene-s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam veteran, reaches out to Tricia. Togethe