The Yellow Birds

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Editorial Reviews
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Overview

A novel written by a veteran of the war in Iraq, The Yellow Birds is the harrowing story of two young soldiers trying to stay alive.

"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.

Winner of the 2013 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award
2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner
Winner of the 2012 Guardian First Book Award
2012 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction
One of the New York Times Book Review's Top 10 Books of 2012

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The Yellow Birds

What People Are Saying

Philip Caputo

The minute I read Kevin Powers's marvelous first sentence—'The war tried to kill us in the spring'—I knew I was in the hands of an exceptional writer. That line is right up there with 'Call me Ishmael.' And I wasn't disappointed. Powers's poetic gifts render the experience of Americans in Iraq with great emotional intensity. War has been a subject of literature ever since The Iliad. The best books transcend their time and circumstances to say something enduring and truthful about war itself. The Yellow Birds belongs in that category.
--Philip Caputo, author of A Rumor of War

Anthony Swofford

Is there such a thing as a 1,000 word blurb? Because my admiration for this book is so deep that I have one. But start here: The Yellow Birds is a superb novel. Call it a war novel or a first novel or whatever you'd like. 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, author of Jarhead

Ann Patchett

The Yellow Birds is harrowing, inexplicably beautiful, and utterly, urgently necessary.
--Ann Patchett

Alice Sebold

This is a novel I've been waiting for. The Yellow Birds is born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence.

Daniel Woodrell

The most recent war is much like the most ancient, torn bodies, cracked psyches, the emotional roundelay of pride, pain, confusion and sorrow. In The Yellow Birds, 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 The Outlaw Album

Tom Wolfe

The Yellow Birds is the All Quiet on the Western Front of America's Arab wars.—Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe

The All Quiet on the Western Front of America's Arab wars.

Ann Patchett

The Yellow Birds is harrowing, inexplicably beautiful, and utterly, urgently necessary.

Chris Cleave

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.

Anthony Swofford

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.

Robert Olen Butler

We haven't just been waiting for a great novel to come out of the Iraq War, our 21^st 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.

Edna O'Brien

In the great tradition of Hemingway and Tim O'Brien, Kevin Powers's exquisitely written The Yellow Birds draws us in to the combat zones of Iraq: the watch, the wait ("Stay alive, Stay alert"), the bungle, the slaughter, and the irreparable aftermath.

Hilary Mantel

Remarkable for its intensity of both feeling and expression. In this book about death, every line is a defiant assertion of the power of beauty to revivify, whether beauty shows itself in nature or (later) in art. Graves, Owen, and Sassoon would have recognised this war and the strange poetry it has bred.

Daniel Woodrell

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.

Colm Toibin

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. The music of his prose has an exquisite mixture of control and then release which mirrors the action of the book, and the psychological and physical pressures under which the characters are placed.

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Editorial Reviews

The New York Times

…a remarkable first novel, one that stands with Tim O'Brien's enduring Vietnam book, The Things They Carried, as a classic of contemporary war fiction. The Yellow Birds is brilliantly observed and deeply affecting: at once a freshly imagined story about a soldier's coming of age, a harrowing tale 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. Its depiction of war has the surreal kick of Mr. O'Brien's 1978 novel, Going After Cacciato, and a poetic pointillism distinctly its own; they combine to sear images into the reader's mind with unusual power.
—Michiko Kakutani

The Washington Post

Throughout The Yellow Birds, amid the gore and the terror and the boredom, you can hear notes of Powers's work as a poet…More than a little of that rich language would risk turning the novel florid, but Powers rarely oversteps. In the best sections, he moves gracefully between spare, factual description of the soldiers' work to simple, hard-won reflections on the meaning of war…His lacerating honesty never feels false or fails to shock…
—Ron Charles

The New York Times Book Review

…a first novel as compact and powerful as a footlocker full of ammo…the fractured structure replicates the book's themes. Like a chase scene made up of sentences that run on and on and ultimately leave readers breathless, or like a concert description that stops and starts, that swings and sways, that makes us stamp our feet and clap our hands—the nonlinear design of Powers's novel is a beautifully brutal example of style matching content. War destroys. It doesn't just rip through bone and muscle, stone and steel; it fragments the mind as a fist to a mirror might create thousands of bloodied, glittering shards…Kevin Powers has something to say, something deeply moving about the frailty of man and the brutality of war, and we should all lean closer and listen.
—Benjamin Percy

Publishers Weekly

This moving debut from Powers (a former Army machine gunner) is a study of combat, guilt, and friendship forged under fire. Pvt. John Bartle, 21, and Pvt. Daniel Murphy, 18, meet at Fort Dix, N.J., where Bartle is assigned to watch over Murphy. The duo is deployed to Iraq, and the novel alternates between the men’s war zone experiences and Bartle’s life after returning home. Early on, it emerges that Murphy has been killed; Bartle is haunted by guilt, and the details of Murphy’s death surface slowly. Powers writes gripping battle scenes, and his portrait of male friendship, while cheerless, is deeply felt. As a poet, the author’s prose is ambitious, which sets his treatment of the theme apart—as in this musing from Bartle: “though it’s hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and end of my war.” The sparse scene where Bartle finally recounts Murphy’s fate is masterful and Powers’s style and story are haunting. (Sept.)

Benjamin Percy

A first novel as compact and powerful as a footlocker full of ammo....Kevin Powers has something to say, something deeply moving about the frailty of man and the brutality of war, and we should all lean closer and listen.
— New York Times Book Review

Ron Charles

A novel of grit, grace, and blood by an Iraq war veteran....Kevin Powers moves gracefully between spare, factual description of the soldiers' work to simple, hard-won reflections on the meaning of war.
— Washington Post

Los Angeles Times

The Yellow Birds might just be the first American literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war.

TIME

An elegiac, sober, and haunting coming-of-age war story.

The New Yorker

An exquisite excavation of the war's moral and psychological wreckage. Powers evokes the peculiar smell and feel of the war better than any journalist.

G.Q.

An unusually spare and lyrical war story....The characters are sketched with as much heart as economy...Like the Iraq heat, which 'had the surprising effect of reducing one to tears in an instant,' The Yellow Birds skulks along, detached and undemanding, until all of a sudden you turn a page and find yourself weeping.

Men's Journal

Veteran Kevin Powers's searing debut novel brings the Iraq War home in compelling detail....The Yellow Birds is luminous...an indispensable portrait of the Iraq War and its impact of those who fought it.

Library Journal

This first novel by Powers traces the story of a young soldier named John Bartle and his friend Murph during fighting in northern Iraq in 2005. Sterling, the tough sergeant of their platoon, has informally assigned Bartle the job of watching over Murph, who is young, small, and not much of a soldier, and Bartle had also promised Murph's mother that he would take care of him. As the horrors of war escalate, all the soldiers seem to lose their grip, and Murph finally snaps, leaving the compound and forcing Bartle and Sterling to search for him through the nightmarish landscape of a ravaged city. Alternating with this plot is the story of Bartle's life after his return home, as he attempts to piece together his friend's fate and come to grips with it. VERDICT 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. While the battle scenes are effectively dramatized, the main character's inner turmoil is the focal point of this well-done novel. [See Prepub Alert, 3/22/12.]—Jim Coan, SUNY at Oneonta

Kirkus Reviews

A novel about the poetry and the pity of war. The title comes from an Army marching chant that expresses a violence that is as surprising as it is casual. Pvt. John Bartle's life becomes linked to that of Pvt. Daniel Murphy when they're both assigned to Fort Dix before a deployment to Iraq. Murph has just turned 18, but at 21, Bartle is infinitely more aged. In a rash statement, one that foreshadows ominous things to come, Bartle promises Murph's mother that he'll look out for him and "bring him home to you." The irascible Sgt. Sterling overhears this promise and cautions Bartle he shouldn't have said anything so impulsive and ill-advised. In Iraq nine months later, the two friends go on missions that seem pointless in theory but that are dangerous in fact. They quickly develop an apparent indifference and callousness to the death and destruction around them, but this indifference exemplifies an emotional distance necessary for their psychological survival. As the war intensifies in Nineveh province, they witness and participate in the usual horrors that many soldiers in war are exposed to. As a result of his experiences, Murph starts to act strangely, becoming more isolated and withdrawn until he finally snaps. Eventually he, too, becomes a victim of the war, and Bartle goes home to face the consequences of a coverup in which he'd participated. Powers writes with a rawness that brings the sights and smells as well as the trauma and decay of war home to the reader.

Michiko Kakutani

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.
— The New York Times

Tom Wolfe

"The All Quiet on the Western Front of America's Arab wars."

Ann Patchett

"The Yellow Birds is harrowing, inexplicably beautiful, and utterly, urgently necessary."

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

"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."

Alice Sebold

"This is a novel I've been waiting for. The Yellow Birds is born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence."

Colm Toibin

"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."

Philipp Meyer

"Compelling, brilliantly written, and heart-breakingly 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."

Chris Cleave

"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."

Daniel Woodrell

"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."

Anthony Swofford

"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."

Robert Olen Butler

"We haven't just been waiting for a great novel to come out of the Iraq War, our 21^st 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."

The Barnes & Noble Review

The question Kevin Powers got most often after his tour of duty in Iraq was "What's it like over there?" In his first novel, The Yellow Birds, he answers from inside the war with an intimate book that's as powerful as it is heartbreaking.

Pvt. John Bartle, an Army machine gunner, has returned home from "our little pest of a war" crippled by hidden wounds. He's twenty-one, just a kid, and after the things he saw and did in the deserts of Al Tafar, he's shell-shocked. Daniel Murphy, the eighteen-year-old fellow Virginian he was paired with in boot camp, has been killed. In a splintered narrative that shifts back and forth in time — mirroring the disintegration of Bartle's own mind and soul ? the young man fights both to tell and to remember the truth about his friend's death.

Unlike the Second World War fought by his grandfather, an experience made manageable by its "destination and purpose," the conflict in Iraq is circular and seemingly unending. Here's Bartle as he waits on the eve of yet another battle in the same city, describing his war: "We'd go back into a city that had fought this battle yearly; a slow, bloody parade in fall to mark the change of the season. We'd drive them out. We always had. We'd kill them. They'd shoot us and blow off our limbs and run into the hills and wadis, back into the alleys and dusty villages. Then they'd come back, and we'd start over by waving to them as they leaned against lampposts and unfurled green awnings while drinking tea in front of their shops. While we patrolled the streets, we'd throw candy to their children with whom we'd fight in the fall a few more years from now."

Powers himself, who was seventeen when he joined the Army and twenty-three when he shipped off to Iraq, came home restless and adrift. He eventually found his way to the poetry program at the University of Texas, and it shows up in his prose. Though the plot in The Yellow Birds is slight, the sustained and merciless close-up that the novel presents has an unsettling power: sun and heat and sand and shade and — just as you're lulled — the bullets come. So does death, and for the survivors, numbness.

With such a small portion of the nation shouldering such a large burden of this war, it has become easy to turn a blind eye to the fates of those who crumble under the burden. In flashes, Powers ensures that we, too, are properly haunted, as when Bartles and his fellow soldiers read the name of a fallen comrade and feel the chill of his sudden, permanent absence: "[W]e were sure that he'd walked as a ghost for years through South Texas?. We thought that he was already dead on the flight over, that if he was scared when the C 141 bringing him to Iraq had pitched and yawed through the sky over Baghdad there had been no need. He had nothing to fear. He'd been invincible, absolutely, until the day he was not."

Veronique de Turenne is a Los Angeles–based journalist, essayist, and playwright. Her literary criticism appears on NPR and in major American newspapers. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a handwritten thank-you note from him a few days later.

Reviewer: Veronique de Turenne

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Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780316219365
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Publication date: 9/11/2012
Pages: 230
Sales rank: 17,034
Product dimensions: 8.30 (w) x 5.70 (h) x 1.00 (d)

Meet the Author

Kevin Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, 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 Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. This is his first novel.

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The Yellow Birds

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More About This Book

Overview

The Yellow Birds

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times

The Washington Post

The New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Benjamin Percy

Ron Charles

Los Angeles Times

TIME

The New Yorker

G.Q.

Men's Journal

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Michiko Kakutani

Tom Wolfe

Ann Patchett

Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times

Alice Sebold

Colm Toibin

Philipp Meyer

Chris Cleave

Daniel Woodrell

Anthony Swofford

Robert Olen Butler

The Barnes & Noble Review

Product Details

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Customer Reviews

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This is one powerful novel ! It is intense, soul-searching and s

Highly recommend - there is no glorification of this war

Good

A foot soldier, who enlists in the army for ambiguous reasons, e

Outstanding first book

An absolutely compelling, mesmerizing novel that would read more

A classic war novel

Didn't Finish It

Silversky an many more

Kassity

A great read!

A huge look into a soldiers life

Very intense and captivating. This was definitely not what I was

Insightful and really gives you a feeling of what it's like to b

Well written and troubling

Awesome

Disapointed

Death

To birchstar, URGENT

Novaclaw

Available on NOOK devices and apps

Nook Devices

NOOK HD/HD+ Tablet

NOOK

NOOK Color

NOOK Tablet

Tablet/Phone

NOOK for Windows 8 Tablet

NOOK for iOS

NOOK for Android

NOOK Kids for iPad

PC/Mac

NOOK for Windows 8

NOOK Study

NOOK for Web