In this powerful debut novel, three American soldiers haunted by their actions in Afghanistan search for absolution and human connection in family and civilian life.
Wintric Ellis joins the army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Kristen, and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of his horizon. Deployed for two years in Afghanistan in a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings in a place where allies could at any second turn out to be foes. Two career soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wing. Together, these three men face an impossible choice: risk death or commit a harrowing act of war.
The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world, where his own children may fear to touch him and his nightmares still hold sway. Jesse Goolsby casts backward and forward in time to track these unforgettable characters from childhood to parenthood, from redwood forests to open desert roads to the streets of Kabul. Hailed by Robert Olen Butler as a "major literary event," I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them is a work of disarming eloquence and heart-wrenching wisdom—a debut novel from a writer to watch.
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“Why do we honor combat veterans? In his new novel, Air Force officer Jesse Goolsby asks that question through the stories of three veterans, their experiences in war, and their lives back at home. I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them is grounded in the wars of the last fifteen years, but Goolsby points out the action takes place as much in the private lives the men lead in America as it does on the battlefield…‘Those who have seen combat—it’s such a difficult thing …[he says] ‘to work through and process. But I think at the core of it, we just want a conversation about what our country asks of us. And not just what our country asks of our service members, but what it asks of their families, of their friends, and of their communities.’”
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NPR