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“The All Quiet on the Western Front of America’s Arab wars.”
— Tom Wolfe
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“This is a novel I’ve been waiting for. The Yellow Birds is born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence.”
— Alice Sebold, #1 New York Times bestselling author
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“Reading The Yellow Birds I became certain that I was in the presence of a text that will win plaudits, become a classic, and hold future narratives of the war to a higher standard…A superb literary achievement.”
— Chris Cleave, New York Times bestselling author
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“Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds is written with an intensity which is deeply compelling; every moment, every memory, every object, every move, are conjured up with a fierce and exact concentration and sense of truth.”
— Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author
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“Powers has created a powerful work of art that captures the complexity and life altering realities of combat service. This book will endure. Read it and then put it way up on that high rare shelf alongside Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien.”
— Anthony Swofford, New York Times bestselling author of Jarhead
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“The Yellow Birds is harrowing, inexplicably beautiful, and utterly, urgently necessary.”
— Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author
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“We haven’t just been waiting for a great novel to come out of the Iraq War, our twenty-first-century Vietnam; we have also been waiting for something more important, a work of art that illuminates our flawed and complex and striving humanity behind all such wars. At last we have both in Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds.”
— Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
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“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.”
— New York Times
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“Compelling, brilliantly written, and heartbreakingly true, The Yellow Birds belongs in the same category as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Thus far the definitive novel of our long wars in the Middle East; this book is certain to be read and taught for generations to come.”
— Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust
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“Kevin Powers has delivered an exceptional novel from the war in Iraq, written in clean, evocative prose, lyric and graphic, in assured rhythms, a story for today and tomorrow and the next.”
— Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone
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“This moving debut from Powers (a former Army machine gunner) is a study of combat, guilt, and friendship forged under fire…Powers’ style and story are haunting.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“Thoughtful and analytical, the novel resonates as an accurate and deeply felt portrayal of the effects of post-combat syndrome as experienced by soldiers in the disorienting war in Iraq.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
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“A novel about the poetry and the pity of war…Powers writes with a rawness that brings the sights and smells as well as the trauma and decay of war home to the reader.”
— Kirkus Reviews