"I loved The Typist. It is a beautiful portrait of a kind of walking pneumonia of the spirit that seeks and finds its own cure. It is also, for me, most impressive because of its settingùin a time far before Knight ever drew breath. It is true imagining at its finest."-Richard Bausch"The narrator's strong first-person voice... gives the novel a pensive tone that has more in common with an Alice Munro story than a typical war novel... With its spare, economical prose, this novel brings a different slant to the theme of war and relationships."-Library Journal"Michael Knight tells the story of generals, war, and occupation through the eyes of a typist who proves himself to be the calm at the center of the storm. The result is this elegant, thoughtful, and resonant novel."-Ann Patchett"The Typist is Knight's best book yet. It reads with a combination of urgency and a quiet, rush-less path to the novel's slow reveal. There is not a misstep, not a mislaid sentence. I believed and breathed every single word. This book awed me."-Elizabeth Gilbert"Knight cunningly details the confluence of the boredom of American soldiers and, the economic plight of the post-bombing Japanese. Two cultures collide and gross exploitation occurs, but Knight is still able to craft heartfelt relationships amid the confusion."-BooklistWritten with the stunning economy of language for which Michael Knight's work has always been praised, The Typist is a rich and powerful work of historical fiction that expertly chronicles both the politics of the Pacific Theater of World War II, and the personal relationships born from the tragedies of warfare.When Francis Vancleave ("Van") joins the army in 1944, he expects his term of service to pass uneventfully. His singular talentùtyping ninety-five words a minuteùkeeps him off the battlefield and in General MacArthur's busy Tokyo headquarters, where his days arc filled with letters of dictation and paperwork in triplicate.But little does Van know that the first year of the occupation will prove far more volatile for him than for the U.S. Army. When he's bunked with a troubled combat veteran cum-black marketer and recruited to babysit MacArthur's eight-year-old son, Van is suddenly tangled in the complexùand riskyùpersonal lives of his compatriots. As he brushes shoulders with panpan girls and Communists on the streets of Tokyo, Van struggles to uphold his convictions in the fitce of unexpected conflictùespecially the startling news from his war bride, a revelation that threatens Van with a kind of war wound he never anticipated.Though grounded in history, The Typist is unmistakably contemporary in its portrayal of military occupation and individual experience in an immensely complicated time. At once Sparc and captivating, it is a book about unlikely kinships, good intentions gone awry, and the possibilities of love. Read Less