Fives and Twenty-Fives

“Fives and Twenty-Fives is one of the great novels of war, the kind of book that comes along only once or twice each generation. It pulls off that rare literary feat of being at once expansive and personal. This novel is real and brutal and funny and wise. And most important, it made me finally begin to understand the toll exacted upon our male and female soldiers returning home to a country so tin-eared to the repercussions of what we exact upon our own and on others. Michael Pitre, a two-tour Marine veteran of the Iraq conflict, is not just the real deal, he’s a literary force in the making.” —Joseph Boyden, author of Three Day Road and Through Black Spruce
“An authentic and evocative novel about the many battlefields that soldiers face, Fives and Twenty-Fives represents an important new voice in the literature on war.” —Dominic Tierney, author of How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War
“Talk about ‘boots on the ground.’ This debut novel is powerful and gives us characters (and numbers) no reader will soon forget. Among the best novels to ever come out of the Iraq War, it gives a visceral and moving account of war and its aftermath.” —Robert Bausch, author of On the Way Home
“Michael Pitre’s Fives and Twenty-Fives is a remarkable literary debut, a hauntingly spare, tender, and unflinching account of those who go to war in our own time. While it is, on one level, a story that has come out of the conflict in Iraq—a land and landscape Americans know so much and so little about—at its core the novel raises the notion of struggle to that place where characters discover, in fascinating concentric circles of awareness (the very thing for which they are trained on the battlefield), that this struggle is the task to which they remain inextricably bound. This novel will be one of the cornerstones of the literature on war in the twenty-first century.” —Andrew Krivak, author of The Sojourn
“Pitre existed in this world, came out alive, and in a work of unsurpassed clarity of brilliance brings us a novel where the atrocity of war is placed into our hands.” —Annie Philbrick, owner Bank Square Books

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