A Book of Common Prayer

Infobox Book
name = A Book of Common Prayer
title_orig =
translator =


image_caption = 1995 trade paperback cover
author = Joan Didion
illustrator =
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country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Novel
publisher = Simon & Schuster (orig. publisher) & Vintage International
release_date = 1977
media_type = Print (Hardback & Paperback)
pages = 280 pp (Simon & Schuster paperback edition)
isbn = ISBN 0-671-49589-5 (Simon & Schuster paperback edition)
preceded_by =
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A Book of Common Prayer is a 1977 novel by Joan Didion. It is a story of both personal and political tragedy in the imaginary Central American country of "Boca Grande." In 1983 Didion would publish "Salvador", a book of essays on corruption and violence in El Salvador; the fiction and non-fiction reflect a similar perspective of rage and despair.

Plot introduction

The novel is narrated by Grace Strasser-Mendana, an American ex-patriate who married into the family that dominates Boca Grande politics, the Mendanas. Grace was trained as an anthropologist under Claude Levi-Strauss, and later took up the amateur study of biochemistry, both attempts to find clear-cut, scientific answers to the mysteries of human behavior. Both attempts fail: Grace remains uncomprehending and cut off from the people around her, and in the final line of the novel she admits, "I have not been the witness I wanted to be."

But Grace is not the novel's central character. That is Charlotte Douglas, another American woman sojourning in Boca Grande, although her family ties are elsewhere. Charlotte's beloved daughter Marin has run off with a group of Marxist radicals and taken part in an absurd act of terrorism, and in the wake of her daughter's disappearance Charlotte's marriage to a crusading Berkeley lawyer (not Marin's father), has fallen apart.