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A raw and rampaging debut novel from the author of the "inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining" (NYTBR) memoir Eat the Apple-examining the war after the war for US veterans: returning home.
What was it like? It's the only thing anyone wants to know about war-and the last thing Corporal Dean Pusey wants to talk about, at least not with one of these fat and happy civilians crowding the bar. Dean is two months free from the Marine Corps, and life back in his Indiana hometown is anything but peaceful.
That's when the woman next to him offers to buy him a drink. Max is nice-gorgeous, funny, easy to talk to. Dean doesn't dare tell her about the sheep he took care of on his first deployment, only to watch it get torn to shreds by a pack of wild dogs; or the naked, shivering Iraqi teenager his platoon detained after an IED blast. He needs to leave all that behind and become a new person-the kind who sticks around when Max gets pregnant. He's white-knuckling it, trying to keep calm, and it's not easy. Harder still when his friend and comrade Ruiz starts showing up all over the place like he's been invited-like he didn't die a year ago. He has Max now, he has his baby daughter, River. He doesn't have time for ghosts.
With his signature black humor, hard-eyed honesty, and stylistic ingenuity, Matt Young delivers a novel that turns the typical war story on its head-beginning not with enlistment but with retirement, and locating the life-or-death stakes not in battle, but in the domestic theaters of fatherhood, family, forgiveness, and love.
"Artful and piercing ... an essential addition to the literature of war." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Young...delivers a cleareyed, nonsentimental chronicle of the corrosive and far-reaching effects of war and its inevitable aftermath...War is hell, but Young shows us that what happens afterward can be worse." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Matt Young brilliantly captures the peculiar mixture of pride and sorrow that comes with fighting in our modern wars, and the difficult work of reintegration into civilian life. But more than simply a war story, End of Active Service is a powerful and deeply affecting portrait of the challenges of life and fatherhood, with characters you come to care for deeply." ―Phil Klay, National Book Award winning author of Redeployment
"Young writes with howling musicality, bounding between Iraq and Indiana with the dexterity of a pro and the mania of truth. The effect is irresistible, hilarious, and poignant when least expected. At once a raw portrait of trauma and a takedown of macho brouhaha, End of Active Service delivers shock and awe on every page." ―Jakob Guanzon, National Book Award longlisted author of Abundance
"Warning: this is not a war story. It's the story after the war, the story of rebuilding, painful and raw, brutal in its bald honesty, beautiful too, and startlingly funny. So intimate you'll feel it in your body like a gut-punch, with a voice both taunting and tender. As we're told in the novel's incredible opening, this is a love story, though you won't find it all that familiar. A brilliant, necessary debut novel that surprised me again and again. I didn't want it to end." ―Katie Flynn, author of Island Rule
This information about End of Active Service was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Matt Young is the author of the memoir, Eat the Apple (Bloomsbury, 2018), and the novel, End of Active Service (Bloomsbury, 2024). His stories and essays have appeared in TIME, Granta, Tin House, Catapult, and The Cincinnati Review among other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from Words After War and The Carey Institute for Global Good, and teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Centralia College in Washington.
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