American War
A dystopian novel of survival in a divided America, for fans of Station Eleven
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3,0 • 1 note
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- 5,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Winner of the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction
Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction Book of the Year
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. For fans of Station Eleven.
'American War creates as haunting a post-apocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy did in The Road' – New York Times
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.
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.
Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
El Akkad's debut novel transports us to a terrifyingly plausible future in which the clash between red states and blue has become deadly and the president has been murdered over a contentious fossil fuels bill. In 2074, Sarah T. Chestnut called Sarat comes of age in the neutral state of Louisiana, where she is slowly drawn into the conflict after the death of her father, performing guerrilla operations for the South. Soon she is enmeshed in a resistance movement masterminded by the Dixie militants operating along the Tennessee River, venturing into quarantined South Carolina battlegrounds and Georgia shantytowns alongside spies, assassins, and revolutionaries, like the commanding Adam Bragg and his Salt Lake Boys. Sarat finds brief happiness with Layla, a displaced bar owner from Valdosta, Georgia, but this is only the beginning of Sarat's war, as she is interred in the nightmarish Camp Saturday before being exiled in the wake of a devastating plague. Now an old and broken woman, Sarat must seek redemption in the wreckage of the New World. Part family chronicle, part apocalyptic fable, American War is a vivid narrative of a country collapsing in on itself, where political loyalties hardly matter given the ferocity of both sides and the unrelenting violence that swallows whole bloodlines and erodes any capacity for mercy or reason. This is a very dark read; El Akkad creates a world all too familiar in its grisly realism.
Avis d’utilisateurs
Not enough
Maybe I expected too much from American War, after reading all the praise about it, comparing it to 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, and so forth.
These comparisons did El Akkad’s novel a disservice as far as I’m concerned, because the works mentioned are part of my top 10.
I’m not saying American War is bad; it is interesting, plausible, intelligent. Yet it’s not ground-breaking in its depth, nor is it innovative in the style of writing: I did not find it developed enough, original enough.
The Road or Handmaid’s Tale are novels that kick you in the gut with their style. I didn’t get that here. 1984 gets you at every page because it both summed up and foresaw all the ways a destructive system can break people down, a really amazing prophetical and iconic novel that remains THE reference of dystopian novels for me.
American War does not compare, sorry.