Missionaries

Neither Mason, a US Special Forces medic, nor Lisette, a foreign correspondent, has emerged from America’s long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan unscathed. Yet, for them, war still exerts a terrible draw – the noble calling, the camaraderie, the life-and-death stakes. Where else in the world can such a person go?All roads lead to Colombia, where the US has partnered with the local government to stamp out a vicious civil war and keep the predatory narco gangs at bay. Mason is ready for the good war, and Lisette is more than ready to cover it.A novel of extraordinary suspense, Missionaries is an astonishment whose unsparing drama is infused with a rare wisdom about the human heart.

Reviews of Missionaries

An unflinching and engrossing exploration of violence's agonising persistence * * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) * * Phil Klay's work has the large canvas, bitter clarity, and wild imagination of the great Robert Stone. With Missionaries he more than fulfills the immense promise of Redeployment — GEORGE PACKER This engaging and far-ranging novel is about the thorny battle for reconciliation in the midst of an endlessly-fought war. For all the tense geopolitics and violent special forces raids and guerrilla warfare in Missionaries, Phil Klay's true subject is the contested territory of the heart. It is here, in the novel's poignant exploration of faith and parental love and uneasy moral compromises, that the cost of US military intervention is laid bare. A chilling and accomplished novel — KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE What happens when a novel becomes more than a novel? It becomes a prophecy. Phil Klay has written a prophecy — ELLIOT ACKERMAN A big, rich, clear-eyed book about death and life; wise, compassionate, and yes, as cynical as it needs to be when necessary, but full of vivid people caught up in that organised human violence which is our species' haunting passion. I've maybe never read a war novel this good — AYAD AKHTAR With Missionaries Klay, winner of the National Book Award in 2014, has dropped a novel on us of a muscular veracity as terrifying and important as it is rare in contemporary writing * * The Millions * * Missionaries is an urgent, detailed, compassionate and quietly furious novel about America and her Forever Wars. Intensely readable, exciting, funny and heartbreaking – it will change you — A.L. KENNEDY Missionaries shook me to my core. Klay takes the reader into the heart of Colombian darkness; the abuses of power, the forgotten lives of girls and women and how quickly human dignity – and conscience – get eroded in extreme times. This is audacious, heartbreaking, epic fiction. It touched me greatly — MARY COSTELLO Missionaries has a sweep and incisiveness to it I had almost forgotten novels were capable of. I haven't been so gripped by a book in years. It is immensely smart and far-seeing, and utterly unsparing. Extraordinary — GARTH GREENWELL If Redeployment was about what happened when we ship wars abroad, then Missionaries is what happens when war comes roaring right back. Expansive, explosive, and epic — MARLON JAMES