Writers’ League of Texas Book Award
Balcones Fiction Prize
Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence longlist
Center for Fiction First Novel Prize longlist
Colby Award finalist
British GQ’s Best Books of 2017
The New Zealand Listener’s 100 Best Books of 2017
Amazon’s Best Books of the Month
Indie Next Pick
Austin Chronicle’s Best of Austin
“Van Reet’s intense, multilayered story about a U.S. soldier taken captive by jihadists in Baghdad astonishes, for the author has a rare ability to complicate facile war narratives without blurring his firm moral vision. In a competitive field, it’s the finest Iraq War novel yet written by an American.”
– The Wall Street Journal’s Top Ten Novels of 2017
“A brilliantly written account of kidnap and conquest in the early years of the Iraq War.”
– The Guardian’s Best Fiction of 2017
“An electrifying debut….a nuanced departure from the usual plot-driven war thriller…At a time when political rhetoric is exacerbating divisions worldwide, this is a novel with an urgent message.”
— The Economist
“Combines the intensity of the author’s experience of war as a soldier with the aesthetic distance of literary art….When it’s finished, a visceral sense of the sheer horror of the Iraq war lingers on.”
— The Australian