The Farther Shore

Book excerpt: “Short, sharp, devastating, The Farther Shore is a literary machine gun . . . a winning debut that happens to be a war novel.” —Kansas City Star A small unit of soldiers from the US Army is separated from their command and left for dead. Their only option is to keep moving, in hope that they’ll escape the marauding gangs and clansmen who appear to rule the city. Josh, a young soldier, and his “battle buddies” are left to wander in this hostile territory. A series of nightmarish, often violent encounters leaves only a few of them alive. The Farther Shore is a short, stark war novel in which the characters are both haunting and inhuman, natives and invaders alike. The emerging story reflects a new kind of military engagement, with all the attendant horrors and difficulties of fighting in a strange new postmodern battlefield. In his unforgettable debut novel, Matthew Eck puts readers inside the mind of a confused young soldier caught in the fog of unexpected warfare. “Bold, profane, hallucinatory.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer “Haunting . . . goes beyond the on-the-ground chaos of battle to capture the physical and psychological disorientation of modern war.” —Publishers Weekly “Every word in Eck’s first novel is as solid as a stone. Every moment of crisis feels authentic in its terror and tragedy; indeed, Eck served as a soldier in Somalia at age eighteen. Heir to Hemingway, and damn near as powerful as Cormac McCarthy in The Road, Eck has created a contemporary version of The Red Badge of Courage in this tale of one young man’s trial by fire in the pandemonium of war in an age of high-tech weaponry and low-grade morality.” —Booklist (starred review) “The first great war novel of our generation.” —Salon