The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers audiobook

The Yellow Birds: A Novel

By Kevin Powers
Read by Holter Graham

Little, Brown & Company 9780316219365
5.40 Hours • Unabridged
Format : Digital Download (In Stock)
  • 1 Format: Digital Download
  • $24.98
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    ISBN: 9781619690318

Finalist for the National Book Award, The Yellow Birds is the harrowing story of two young soldiers trying to stay alive in Iraq. "The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss. In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for. In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes actions he could never have imagined. With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel that is destined to become a classic.

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Summary

Summary

A New York Times bestseller

Winner of the 2013 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award

Winner of the 2012 Guardian First Book Award

A 2012 National Book Award Finalist

A 2012 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize Finalist

A 2012 New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book of the Year

A 2012 San Francisco Chronicle Best Book for Fiction

A 2012 Washington Post Notable Book for Fiction

One of the 2012 Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books for Fiction

A 2012 Kansas City Star Top 100 Book for Fiction

A 2012 New York Times Book Review Notable Book

A 2012 BookPage Best Book for Fiction

Selected for the September 2012 Indie Next List

A Publishers Weekly bestseller

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, September 2012

An Amazon Top 100 Book of 2012

Finalist for the National Book Award, The Yellow Birds is the harrowing story of two young soldiers trying to stay alive in Iraq.

"The war tried to kill us in the spring." So begins this powerful account of friendship and loss.

In Al Tafar, Iraq, twenty-one-year old Private Bartle and eighteen-year-old Private Murphy cling to life as their platoon launches a bloody battle for the city. Bound together since basic training when Bartle makes a promise to bring Murphy safely home, the two have been dropped into a war neither is prepared for.

In the endless days that follow, the two young soldiers do everything to protect each other from the forces that press in on every side: the insurgents, physical fatigue, and the mental stress that comes from constant danger. As reality begins to blur into a hazy nightmare, Murphy becomes increasingly unmoored from the world around him and Bartle takes actions he could never have imagined.

With profound emotional insight, especially into the effects of a hidden war on mothers and families at home, The Yellow Birds is a groundbreaking novel that is destined to become a classic.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews

“The All Quiet on the Western Front of America’s Arab wars.” —Tom Wolfe
“This is a novel I’ve been waiting for. The Yellow Birds is born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence.” —Alice Sebold, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“This moving debut from Powers (a former Army machine gunner) is a study of combat, guilt, and friendship forged under fire…Powers’ style and story are haunting.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Thoughtful and analytical, the novel resonates as an accurate and deeply felt portrayal of the effects of post-combat syndrome as experienced by soldiers in the disorienting war in Iraq.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“A novel about the poetry and the pity of war…Powers writes with a rawness that brings the sights and smells as well as the trauma and decay of war home to the reader.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Reading The Yellow Birds I became certain that I was in the presence of a text that will win plaudits, become a classic, and hold future narratives of the war to a higher standard…A superb literary achievement.” —Chris Cleave, New York Times bestselling author
“Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds is written with an intensity which is deeply compelling; every moment, every memory, every object, every move, are conjured up with a fierce and exact concentration and sense of truth.” —Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author
“Powers has created a powerful work of art that captures the complexity and life altering realities of combat service. This book will endure. Read it and then put it way up on that high rare shelf alongside Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien.” —Anthony Swofford, New York Times bestselling author of Jarhead
“The Yellow Birds is harrowing, inexplicably beautiful, and utterly, urgently necessary.” —Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author
“We haven’t just been waiting for a great novel to come out of the Iraq War, our twenty-first-century Vietnam; we have also been waiting for something more important, a work of art that illuminates our flawed and complex and striving humanity behind all such wars. At last we have both in Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds.” —Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author
“A remarkable first novel…The Yellow Birds is brilliantly observed and deeply affecting: at once a freshly imagined bildungsroman about a soldier’s coming of age, a harrowing story about the friendship of two young men trying to stay alive on the battlefield in Iraq, and a philosophical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory…Extraordinary.” —New York Times
“Compelling, brilliantly written, and heartbreakingly true, The Yellow Birds belongs in the same category as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Thus far the definitive novel of our long wars in the Middle East; this book is certain to be read and taught for generations to come.” —Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust
“Kevin Powers has delivered an exceptional novel from the war in Iraq, written in clean, evocative prose, lyric and graphic, in assured rhythms, a story for today and tomorrow and the next.” —Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone

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Reviews

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Author

Author Bio: Kevin Powers

Author Bio: Kevin Powers

Kevin Powers is the author of The Yellow Birds, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the US Army in 2004 and 2005 in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq.

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Details

Details

Available Formats : Digital Download
Runtime: 5.40
Audience: Adult
Language: English

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