In four highly acclaimed novels, Stewart O'Nan has proven himself among the most versatile of young writers, breathing new life into a wide range of literary traditions. A World Away is O'Nan at his most romantic and elegiac. By following the fortunes of the Langer family, whose oldest son, Rennie, is missing in action in the Pacific during World War II, O'Nan brilliantly captures the mood of this lost world and the changing fate of a country aware that when the war ends nothing will ever be the same.