Fiction. What happens to a soldier after war? What happens to the people he comes back to? THE COUNTRY OF LONELINESS is about concentric circles of the effects of war--on soldiers and survivors, on mothers, sisters, widows, wives and children. Dawn Paul's richly nuanced book portrays the life of a Depression-era boy who naively hopes that soldiering will allow him to escape poverty and isolation. Though he returns physically intact from battle, he is scarred psychically--a bully and a terror to his family and himself. The novel alternates between a daughter's memories of growing up with this...