The New York Times Book Review - Dani Shapiro
The literature of war is by its very nature political. If a writer's sentences are personal—what else, really, can they be?—and a writer has trained his lens on a bloody battleground, in reading him we will come to know where he stands, where his passions lie. When it comes to fiction, this passion can often result in rhetoric-spouting characters whose sole purpose is to service the author's ideas. But in The Illuminations…Andrew O'Hagan has created a story that is both a howl against the war in Afghanistan and the societies that have blindly abetted it, and a multilayered, deeply felt tale of family, loss, memory, art, loyalty, secrecy and forgiveness.
