Despite its future setting, it’d feel wrong to call American War a work of science fiction. If violence and conflict feel distant, journalist Omar El Akkad’s debut novel brings them home. has an innate (and depressingly timely) feel for the textural details of dystopia if only his grim near-future fantasy didn’t feel so much like a crystal ball.” Justin Cronin, The New York Times Book Review The only comfort the story offers is that it’s a work of fiction. “Whether read as a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok, an allegory of past conflicts or a study of the psychology of war, American War is a deeply unsettling novel. Across these scarred pages rages the clash that many of us are anxiously speculating about in the Trump era: a nation riven by irreconcilable ideologies, alienated by entrenched suspicions. “Follow the tributaries of today’s political combat a few decades into the future and you might arrive at something as terrifying as Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War. Omar El Akkad’s debut novel, American War, is an unlikely mash-up of unsparing war reporting and plot elements familiar to readers of the recent young-adult dystopian series The Hunger Games and Divergent.” As haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy in The Road, and as devastating a look as the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America.
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