American War Paperback by Omar El Akkad

Product Details

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (2026-07-14)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 416 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780771028366
• Item Weight: 328.86 grams
• Dimensions: 20.96 x 13.97 x 2.21 cm

Shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

A Globe and Mail Best Book

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

A Quill & Quire Best Book of 2017

An audacious and powerful debut novel: a second American Civil War, a devastating plague, and one family caught deep in the middle -- a story that asks what might happen if America were to turn its most devastating policies and deadly weapons upon itself.

Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074. But even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, that unmanned drones fill the sky. And when her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she quickly begins to be shaped by her particular time and place until, finally, through the influence of a mysterious functionary, she is turned into a deadly instrument of war. Telling her story is her nephew, Benjamin Chestnut, born during war as one of the Miraculous Generation and now an old man confronting the dark secret of his past -- his family's role in the conflict and, in particular, that of his aunt, a woman who saved his life while destroying untold others.

About the Author

OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and journalist. Born in Egypt, he grew up in Qatar, until he moved to Canada with his family, and now lives in the United States. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Ferguson, New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, among many other locations around the world. He earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His debut novel, American War, was an international bestseller, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and was nominated for many others. What Strange Paradise, his second, won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.