Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

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<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">Image:Invalids fierce.jpg</td></tr> <tr><th>Country</th><td>United States</td></tr><tr><th>Language</th><td>English</td></tr> <tr><th>Media Type</th><td>Print (Hardback & Paperback)</td></tr><tr><th>Pages</th><td>415 pp</td></tr><tr><th>ISBN</th><td>0553107755</td></tr><tr><th>Preceded by</th><td>Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, 1994</td></tr><tr><th>Followed by</th><td> Villa Incognito, 2003</td></tr>

**Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates**
Author	Tom Robbins
Publisher	Bantam Books
Released	2000

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates is Tom Robbins' seventh and longest novel.

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Invalids follows Switters, our wheelchair-bound protagonist, across four continents, in and out of love and danger. Through Switters, Robbins "explores, challenges, mocks, and celebrates virtually every major aspect of our mercurial era." (Quote from the hardcover book jacket.)

Robbins has stated in numerous interviews that in this book he was trying to deal with contradiction. But rather than eschewing his contradictory nature, as is typical Western practice, Switters embraces it. He's a CIA agent who hates the government. He's a pacifist who carries a gun. He's as much in love with a sixteen-year-old girl as he is with a forty-six-year-old nun. Switters feels that the core of the universe, the heart of existence, is light and dark existing together. One is not separate from the other, they just exist. This is the core of "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates", along with an interest in the Lady of Fatima and a squawking parrot.