The Women

In 1966, twenty-year-old Frankie McGrath is a sheltered young woman from a conservative Southern California family who has been raised to believe her role is marriage and respectability. When her adored brother ships out to Vietnam, a chance remark that "women can be heroes too" sets her on a path no one expects: she trains as a nurse and enlists in the Army Nurse Corps.

Thrown into a combat hospital with almost no preparation, Frankie is overwhelmed by the wounded and the dying, and steadied by the fierce friendships she forms with fellow nurses. When she returns to an America bitterly divided over the war, she faces a different kind of battle, one against a country that would rather pretend women never served at all, and against the wounds, addictions, and silences the war left in her.

Kristin Hannah's sweeping novel is a tribute to the women who served in Vietnam and the long fight to be seen, drawn from extensive interviews with real Army nurses.