The Good Lieutenant

“Like all the best novels of war, Whitney Terrell’s The Good Lieutenant lays bare the special misprisions, faulty intelligences, and colliding ironies that mark our most pitiable human endeavor, not the least of which is the breathtaking waste of it all. But the novel’s brilliant masterstroke is its reverse narrative, which dispels the primacy of destiny and instead proposes an almost magical universe in which these exquisitely wrought figures, full of vulnerability, delicacy, and hope, gain a most amazing grace. This is an arrestingly ingenious achievement.” —Chang-rae Lee

“The Good Lieutenant has the grand complexity of war embedded in its bones. It makes ingenious, compelling art out of those complexities. For that reason alone, its considerable graces are saving ones.”

—Richard Ford

“Whitney Terrell has been in his career both a great novelist and a great war reporter. In The Good Lieutenant he is both, and the effect is overpowering. One job of the reporter is to use facts to let us understand who these men and women are whom we ask to kill and die for us. One job of the novelist is to use imagination to explain the interior lives of others and the infinite nuances of life. It is extraordinary and rare that one writer can do both, but Whitney Terrell does, and masterfully.” —Arthur Phillips

“The Good Lieutenant is a wild Humvee ride of a novel that embeds us so deeply and so sympathetically in its beautifully realized characters—a young woman lieutenant and her platoon of male soldiers—that we can scarcely draw breath until their journey comes to its harrowing conclusion. Whitney Terrell has written a deeply moving work of fiction to set beside Phil Klay’s Redeployment and Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds, with a singularity of vision uniquely its own.” —Joyce Carol Oates

“The Good Lieutenant is a stirring performance grounded in the hard realities of combat. The human beauty here is of the brutal variety—complex, dark, and impossible to forget. Lieutenant Emma Fowler is our guide into a contemporary heart of darkness. This novel should be read by all.”

—Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead

“So exhilarating in its tautly rendered, faultless reality, so timeless in its play of human emotion in extremis, The Good Lieutenant dazzles and shames us as it breaks our hearts. In Lieutenant Emma Fowler, Whitney Terrell makes real the confused politics, personal heroism, and human cost of the Iraq War.The Good Lieutenant joins the ranks of great war novels that explain, too late, why ‘victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.’” —Jayne Anne Phillips

“With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary forms—the war novel—and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true. Terrell knows his facts on the ground, but this is emphatically, triumphantly, a work of imagination and literary ingenuity. It opens in conflagration—everything having gone wrong for Lieutenant Emma Fowler in one explosive instant—and from there the mystery of how we got to this disastrous moment unfolds backward, Memento­-like, as we watch Emma become more innocent, her life more full of hope and possibility, with each day less of war that she has experienced. This is brilliant, bold, heartbreaking storytelling for material that demands nothing less.” —Adam Johnson