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Shop nowI’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them
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Learn moreIn this powerful debut novel, three American soldiers haunted by their actions in Afghanistan search for absolution and human connection in family and civilian life.
Wintric Ellis joins the army as soon as he graduates from high school, saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Kristen, and to the backwoods California town whose borders have always been the limits of his horizon. Deployed for two years in Afghanistan in a directionless war, he struggles to find his bearings in a place where allies could at any second turn out to be foes. Two career soldiers, Dax and Torres, take Wintric under their wing. Together, these three men face an impossible choice: risk death or commit a harrowing act of war.
The aftershocks echo long after each returns home to a transfigured world, where his own children may fear to touch him and his nightmares still hold sway. Jesse Goolsby casts backward and forward in time to track these unforgettable characters from childhood to parenthood, from redwood forests to open desert roads to the streets of Kabul. Hailed by Robert Olen Butler as a "major literary event," I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them is a work of disarming eloquence and heart-wrenching wisdom—a debut novel from a writer to watch.
Jesse Goolsby’s fiction and essays have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Epoch, Literary Review, and many other publications. He is the recipient of the John Gardner Memorial Award in Fiction, the Richard Bausch Short Story Prize, and a distinguished fellowship from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. A US Air Force officer, Goolsby lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his family.
Andrew Eiden came from a long line of theater folk and has been acting since the age of four. He has starred in dozens of commercials as well as multiple television shows. At the age of eleven, he won first place in a local drama festival, which jumpstarted his acting career. He has performed in theaters ranging from the Glendale Center Theater to the Pasadena Playhouse.
Reviews
“Not only is Jesse Goolsby one of the very rare authors who writes with authoritative insight into the warfare of the twenty-first century, he does so with an even deeper insight into the universal human condition. Goolsby’s real subject, always, is the profound yearning for connection, for identity, that drives us all. He is a consummate artist, and the publication of I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them is a major literary event.”
“Long after the combatants and non-combatants alike have vanished from this earth, the afterlife of war is a book, war’s only survivor, and every true book about war cries out, ‘Stop,’ or at least, ‘Remember.’ I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them, Jesse Goolsby’s ambitious, multilayered, brutally honest debut novel, is such a book, an antidote to our nation’s disconnect from our misadventures overseas.”
“Why do we honor combat veterans? In his new novel, Air Force officer Jesse Goolsby asks that question through the stories of three veterans, their experiences in war, and their lives back at home. I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them is grounded in the wars of the last fifteen years, but Goolsby points out the action takes place as much in the private lives the men lead in America as it does on the battlefield…‘Those who have seen combat—it’s such a difficult thing …[he says] ‘to work through and process. But I think at the core of it, we just want a conversation about what our country asks of us. And not just what our country asks of our service members, but what it asks of their families, of their friends, and of their communities.’”
“Goolsby expertly renders his characters, bringing their struggles to life.”
“Traveling back and forth through time, Goolsby explores the challenges these men face before, during, and after their military tours, portraying their stresses vividly and palpably.”
“This bracing, riveting debut opens in Afghanistan, and actions there shadow the lives of Goolsby’s characters. But it’s the accidents, debts, and desires of the home front that continue to wreak havoc as war memories turn into just that—memories—and soldiers mired in the past realize that tackling the future may be their true struggle after all.”
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