VIDA VIDA is the most important novel yet written about the political '60s and '70s; it is at the same time a sensual and moving love story. Vida is full of the pleasures and pains, the experiments, disasters and victories of an extraordinary band of people. At the center of the novel stands Vida Asch. She has lived underground for almost a decade. Back in the '60s she was a political star of the exuberant antiwar movement -— a red-haired beauty photographed for the pages of Life magazine -— charismatic, passionate and totally sure she would prevail. Now, a decade later, Vida is on the run, her star-quality replaced by stubborn courage. She comes briefly to rest in a safe house on Cape Cod. To her surprise and annoyance, she finds another person in the house, a fugitive, Joel, ten years younger than she, a kid who dropped into the underground out of the army. As they spend the next days together, Vida finds herself warming toward a man for the first time in years, knowing all too well the dangers. READ FIRST CHAPTER

"I have just finished Marge Piercy's VIDA. I think it is magnificent. There is much
about it I admire - its craft, its structure, the carefully observed details of all the
sensuous elements of life: smells, tastes, natural environments, people's clothes,
stances, the look and feel of places. Vida herself is superb and utterly believable. I
know it is a wonderful book; it may be a great one." -— Marilyn French

"Real people inhabit its pages and real suspense carries the story along...VIDA of course means life and she personifies it...I found the book fascinating."
—The Chicago Tribune

"A fully controlled, tightly structured dramatic narrative of such artful intensity that it leads the reader on at almost every page."
—The New York Times Book Review

"Marge Piercy's strong, complex yet lucid political novel is a flame opus....a fire show: sometimes the explosion of a grenade, sometimes the glow of an oil lamp in a New England farm house, sometimes sparks from the friction of IRT subway wheels or the friction of passion between men and women or women and women, sometimes a veritable son et lumiere of the 60's and 70's..."
—The Washington Post

"An epic story fueled with intense commitment and sensuousness...Piercy shows characters surviving...with integrity and tenderness...in a political milieu. VIDA may be to women in the 80's what THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK was to women in the 60's."
—The Los Angeles Times

"Marge Piercy tells us exactly how it was in the lofts of the Left as the 1960s turned into the '70s. This is the way everybody sounded This is the way everybody behaved. Vida bears witness;'
--The New York Times

"Very exciting. Marge Piercy's characters are complex and very human;'
.---Margaret Atwood

READ FIRST CHAPTER