Terrell, W: Good Lieutenant

'If only people read more novels like this one, told backward from a young woman's experience in Iraq back to her innocence in the American Midwest, we might think twice about sending soldiers to war.' Boston Globe'Books of the Year'

'Devastating . . . Superb: [Terrell's] dialogue, his prose, the humane sorrow that suffuses his observations . . . Startlingly original . . . [The Good Lieutenant] might be the best work of fiction the Bush wars have produced so far.' Guardian

In the outskirts of Baghdad, Lieutenant Emma Fowler's platoon unwittingly rolls into a buried maze of IEDs - and their Humvee is blasted into a shrapnel-torn wreck.

From this catastrophic moment, The Good Lieutenant unspools backward in time as Fowler and her platoon are guided into disaster by suspicious informants and questionable intelligence, their mission the result of a previous snafu in which a soldier was kidnapped by insurgents.

'A bitter, sly, heartbreaking story of well-meant but ill-fated intentions, and of a battlefield incident that wreaks havoc on the lives that converge, or end, there.' New Yorker

'Powerful and heartbreaking' New Statesman