"Sparta made young boys into warriors; it was left to the warriors to restore themselves to men…"
Conrad Farrell's family has no military heritage, but as a classics major at Williams, he saw the sturdy appeal of the Marine ethic: Semper fidelis came straight from the ancient world, from Sparta, where every citizen doubled as a full-time soldier. When Conrad joined the Marines after college, he expected to further a long tradition of honor, courage, and commitment.
Now Conrad has just returned home to Westchester after four years in Iraq, and something is very wrong. Everything should be fine—he hasn't been shot or wounded by an IED, and he's never had psychological troubles—but as he attempts to reconnect with his girlfriend and find his footing in the civilian world, he has an impossible time adjusting to the people and places he used to love and to a commonplace life of hotel reservations, dinner conversation, long showers, and alone time. As the weeks turn into months, Conrad's bitterness only festers, and he begins to fear that his rage, when it comes out, will have irreparable consequences.
Suspenseful and perceptive, Sparta captures the nuances of the unique estrangement that modern soldiers face as they attempt to rejoin the society they've fought for. With the powerful insight and acuity that marked Cost and her earlier novels, Robinson has delivered her best book yet.
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“A tour
de force…Sparta is a novel
with a mission—which in lesser writer’s hands could spell its doom. But
Robinson manages to convey the difficulties of a warrior returning to society and
dramatize how we fail our veterans without reducing her story to a polemic. She
pulls this off by expertly deploying three literary weapons: emotional insight, moral nuance, and
intellectual depth…Robinson
brings the tolls of war up close…Her explanation of the mishandled early
missions in Fallujah and the clash between the long-ruling minority Sunnis and
the majority Shiites is as clear as any I’ve read…But it’s Robinson’s portrait of the Veterans Affairs system that is most
devastating…Robinson demonstrated her deftness in handling the dynamics of a family under duress in Cost…Robinson’s powerful novel demonstrates that fiction actually can function
as a sort of explosive device.”
—
Washington Post