American War

Winner of the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary FictionShortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the Year.2074. America's future is Civil War. Sarat's reality is survival. They took her father, they took her home, they told her lies . . . She didn't start this war, but she'll end it.Omar El Akkad’s powerful debut novel imagines a dystopian future: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague and one family caught deep in the middle. In American War, we’re asked to consider what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons against itself.

American War creates as haunting a post-apocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy did in The Road, and as devastating a look at the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth did in The Plot Against America., So sharply observed . . . hard to resist., This is extremely good . . . Basically was hoping for my train to be delayed, This is an outstanding book – 1984 meets The Handmaid’s Tale – that feels closer to reality than it possibly should., America’s tortured present lends unsettling believability to American War, the dystopian debut from journalist Omar El Akkad with its late 21st-century picture of a second civil war, fought over fossil fuel in a US devastated by environmental disaster. Brilliantly imagined, it’s both a timely tale and a salutary warning.

Omar El Akkad is an award-winning journalist, and author of American War, who has travelled around the world to cover many of the most important news stories of the last decade. His reporting includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantanamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He is a recipient of a National Newspaper Award for investigative reporting and the Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Journalists, as well as three National Magazine Award honorable mentions. He lives in Portland, Oregon.