Kevin Powers
publisher
Little, Brown and Company
format
Hardcover
pages
240 pages
Claire Messud
The Interestings: A Novel
Meg Wolitzer
All That Is
James Salter
After Visiting Friends: A Son's Story
Michael Hainey
THE YELLOW BIRDS: A NOVEL
When I reached page 14 of Kevin Powers's brilliant debut novel, THE YELLOW BIRDS, I put it down and studied my suffering. In the end, I realized that it was nothing compared to Powers's, and so I marched on, spellbound by the beauty and intensity in his writing. This novel reminds me of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED by Tim O'Brien, another book that provoked pain and suffering. Powers enlisted in the Army when he was 17 and served as a machine-gunner in Iraq. In the northern city of Al Tafar, 21 year old Pvt. John Bartle and his platoon engage in a bloody campaign to control the city. Before his deployment, Bartle promised the mother of 18 year old Pvt. Daniel Murphy he would take care of her son and bring him back alive. It's a promise that he will not keep, and that's not a spoiler; it's revealed from the earliest pages. The novel moves fitfully through Virginia and Iraq and Germany and New Jersey and Kentucky, from 2003 to 2009. Recalling the war, Bartles says is "like putting a puzzle together from behind: the shapes familiar, the picture quickly fading, the muted tan of the cardboard backing a tease at wholeness and completion." Powers has much to say and we need to listen to his words about the frailty of man and the brutality of war. You won't regret reading this new masterpiece.
About the AuthorBeyond the book
“A remarkable first novel...The Yellow Birds is brilliantly observed and deeply affecting: at once a freshly imagined bildungsroman about a soldier's coming of age, a harrowing story about the friendship of two young men trying to stay alive on the battlefield in Iraq, and a philosophical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory...Extraordinary.” – Michiko Kakutani The New York Times
“An elegaic, sober, and haunting coming-of-age war story.” – TIME
“The Yellow Birds might just be the first American literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war.” – Los Angeles Times