The Good Lieutenant
A Novel
ISBN10: 1250132169
ISBN13: 9781250132161
Trade Paperback
288 Pages
$19.00
CA$26.00
On 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. The novel unfolds from points of view that are not customarily included in war coverage—a tenacious female officer, jaded career soldiers, and Iraqis both innocent and not so innocent.
Brilliantly told by an acclaimed writer at the top of his form, Whitney Terrell's The Good Lieutenant is a gripping, insightful, and necessary novel about a war that is proving to be the defining tragedy of our time.
Reviews
Praise for The Good Lieutenant
"With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms—the war novel—and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly, a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration—everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant—and from there the mystery of how we got to this disastrous moment unfolds backward, Memento-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less."—Adam Johnson
"So exhilarating in its tautly rendered, faultless reality, so timeless in its play of human emotion in extremis, The Good Lieutenant dazzles and shames us as it breaks our hearts. In Lieutenant Emma Fowler, Whitney Terrell makes real the confused politics, personal heroism, and human cost of the Iraq War. The Good Lieutenant joins the ranks of great war novels that explain, too late, why 'victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.’”—Jayne Anne Phillips
"Whitney Terrell has been in his career both a great novelist and a great war reporter. In The Good Lieutenant he is both, and the effect is overpowering. One job of the reporter is to use facts to let us understand who these men and women are whom we ask to kill and die for us. One job of the novelist is to use imagination to explain the interior lives of others and the infinite nuances of life. It is extraordinary and rare that one writer can do both, but Whitney Terrell does, and masterfully."—Arthur Phillips "
"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
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Behind the Scenes of The Good Lieutenant
Because The Good Lieutenant focuses on a female soldier, Lieutenant Emma Fowler, Whitney Terrell realized early on that he was going to rely on the expertise of the many women who’d fought and served in Iraq—as well as the men. Former Sergeant Angela Fitle and Major Stacy Moore are two of the many veterans and active duty personnel who shared their experiences with him and advised him on this novel.
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