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Published May 2014
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
When Corporal Elijah Russell's superb horsemanship is revealed during a firefight in northern Iraq, the young Army Ranger is assigned to an elite Special Forces unit preparing to stage a secret mission in eastern Afghanistan. Elijah's task is to train the Green Berets - fiercely loyal to their enigmatic commander, Captain Wynne - to ride the horses they will use to execute this mission through treacherous mountain terrain. But as the team presses farther into enemy territory, the nature of their operation only becomes more mysterious and Wynne's charismatic power takes on a darker cast. Ultimately, Elijah finds himself forced to make a choice: on one side, his best friend and his most deeply held beliefs; on the other, a commanding officer driven by a messianic zeal for his mission.
Based on the author's extensive interviews with Green Berets, Army Rangers, and other veterans, this taut page-turner brilliantly fuses the war novel and the Western into a compellingly original tale.
"Starred Review. [Gwyn] captures the essence of close combat - the terror, excitement, chaos, tension, and cruelty, as well as the harsh decisions men make under stress...its gritty realism is part of the strength." - Publishers Weekly
"The captain's ordinariness, in tandem with Russell's woeful-but-predictable love affair, causes the novel to veer from the high literary into a genre effort that's long on action and short on character development. Nothing wrong with that, but the reader is left feeling that Gwyn wants to write for the movies. Wynne's War, in fact, would make a fine movie." - Booklist
"Many folks have wondered when American authors would begin producing memorable fiction about the Iraq-Afghanistan wars; with this well-researched, heart-pounding novel, Gwyn stakes his claim." - Library Journal
"I haven't had this much fun as a reader in a long time. Wynne's War is a great adventure story, impeccably researched, masterfully plotted, with chapters that blur by like a hail of bullets." - Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon
"Wynne's War combines two of America's great literary genres, the Western and the war story, brilliantly. This taut, elegant, beautiful novel takes us straight to the tension at the heart of combat decision-making: mission or men." - Nathaniel Fick, author of One Bullet Away
"This novel feels like Cormac McCarthy meets Tim O'Brien. I could not stop reading it." - Philipp Meyer, author of The Son
This information about Wynne's War 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.
Aaron Gwyn was raised on a cattle ranch in rural Oklahoma. He is the author of a story collection, Dog on the Cross (finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award), and a novel, The World Beneath. His short stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in Esquire, McSweeney's, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, Gettysburg Review, and New Stories from the South. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina where he is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and contributes book reviews, articles, and narrative nonfiction to Esquire.
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