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'A wild Humvee ride of a novel that embeds us so deeply and so sympathetically in its beautifully realized characters - a young woman lieutenant and her platoon of male soldiers - that we can scarcely draw breath until their journey comes to its harrowing conclusion. Whitney Terrell has written a deeply moving work of fiction to set beside Phil Klay's Redeployment and Kevin Powers's The Yellow Birds, with a singularity of vision uniquely its own.' Joyce Carol Oates
'The Good Lieutenant has the grand complexity of war embedded in its bones. It makes ingenious, compelling art out of those complexities. For that reason alone, its considerable graces are saving ones.' Richard Ford
'A stirring performance grounded in the hard realities of combat. The human beauty here is of the brutal variety - complex, dark, and impossible to forget . . . This novel should be read by all.' Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead
'A terrific exploration of courage, leadership, and loss . . . Terrell captures the humanity and the absurdity of the conflict in a way that feels both specific to the Iraq conflict and also unnervingly timeless. A stunning and heartbreaking testament to Terrell's genius and the nature of modern war.' Gillian Flynn
About the author
Whitney Terrell was an embedded reporter in Iraq during 2006 and 2010 and covered the war for the Washington Post, Slate, and NPR. He teaches creative writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and lives nearby with his family. He is the author of two previous novels.
Summary
Whitney Terrell's remarkable novel of the Iraq War, The Good Lieutenant, literally starts with a bang, as an operation led by Lieutenant Emma Fowler goes spectacularly wrong. Men are dead - one, a young Iraqi, by her hand. Others of the casualties were soldiers in her platoon. And the signals officer, Dixon Pulowski. Pulowski is another story entirely - Fowler and Pulowski have been lovers since they first met at Fort Riley in Kansas . . .
From this conflagration, The Good Lieutenant unspools backward in time as Fowler and her platoon are guided into disaster by suspect informants and questionable intelligence, their very mission the consequence of a previous snafu in which an American soldier had been kidnapped by insurgents. We hear the voice of Lieutenant Fowler but also those of jaded career soldiers and Iraqis both innocent and not so innocent. Ultimately, as all these stories unravel, Terrell reveals what can happen when good intentions destroy, experience distorts, and survival becomes everything.
Foreword
A gripping, insightful, necessary novel of the war that is proving to be the defining tragedy of our time.
Additional text
The Good Lieutenant’s impersonation of an onion being unpeeled works to powerful effect . . . For Terrell’s characters, war has determined that life itself is essentially unreliable. That he has turned this into fiction at once compelling and sensitive, dramatic and intelligent, is impressive indeed.
