Green on Blue

From a decorated veteran of the Iraq and Afghan Wars, and White House Fellow, a stirring debut novel about a young Afghan orphan and the harrowing, intractable nature of war.

Aziz and his older brother Ali are coming of age in a village amid the pine forests and endless mountains of eastern Afghanistan. There is no school, but their mother teaches them to read and write, and once a month sends the boys on a two-day journey to the bazaar. They are poor, but inside their mud-walled home, the family has stability, love, and routine.

When a convoy of armed men arrives in their village one day, their world crumbles. The boys survive and make their way to a small city, where they sleep among other orphans. They learn to beg, and, eventually, they earn work and trust from the local shopkeepers. Ali saves their money and sends Aziz to school at the madrassa, but when US forces invade the country, militants strike back. A bomb explodes in the market, and Ali is brutally injured.

In the hospital, Aziz meets an Afghan wearing an American uniform. To save his brother, Aziz must join the Special Lashkar, a US-funded militia. No longer a boy, but not yet a man, he departs for the untamed border. Trapped in a conflict both savage and entirely contrived, Aziz struggles to understand his place. Will he embrace the brutality of war or leave it behind, and risk placing his brother—and a young woman he comes to love—in jeopardy?

Having served five tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, Elliot Ackerman has written a gripping, morally complex debut novel, an astonishing feat of empathy and imagination about boys caught in a deadly conflict.

""Green on Blue" is harrowing, brutal, and utterly absorbing. With spare prose, Ackerman has spun a morally complex tale of revenge, loyalty, and brotherly love. The saga of young Aziz is a chilling and often disturbing glimpse into one of the world's most troubled regions."--Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

"Like "The Thin Red Line"'s Guadalcanal, "Green on Blue"'s Shkin is one war's heart, marked by loss, ambition, blood. Only Ackerman (a veteran, like Jones) isn't channeling the American view; his extraordinary empathy marks this novel as something more than brilliant. It is brave."--Lea Carpenter, author of Eleven Days

What makes" Green on Blue "so brilliantly poignant is Elliot Ackerman's feeling of empathy, his ability to get under his characters' skin, reminding us not only of our vast differences but of our shared humanity."--Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

""Green on Blue" is a remarkable achievement, a novel of war, betrayal, love, and honor that feels equally timeless and timely. Aleksander Solzhenitsyn once wrote that the line dividing good and evil doesn't run between nations, but through every human heart. Elliot Ackerman traces that shifting line with enormous empathy and intelligence."--Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

"With a tension and tenderness reminiscent of Graham Greene, Elliot Ackerman's gripping novel of revenge and honor deftly reveals the complex machinations of a too often oversimplified war."--Alexander Maksik, author of You Deserve Nothing and A Marker to Measure Drift

"What makes "Green on Blue" so brilliantly poignant is Elliot Ackerman's feeling of empathy, his ability to get under his characters' skin, reminding us not only of our vast differences but of our shared humanity."--Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

"Ackerman's novel is bleak and uncompromising, a powerful war story that borders on the noir."--Publishers Weekly

""Green on Blue "is a novel that conveys, with harrowing power, the fallout that decades of war (going back through the Soviet occupation of the 1980s) has had on that country's people, and at the same time, it's a kind of Greek tragedy about the cycles of revenge and violence that can consume families and tribes, generation after generation...This novel as a whole attests to Mr. Ackerman's breadth of understanding -- an understanding not just of the seasonal rhythms of war in Afghanistan and the harsh, unforgiving beauty of that land, not just of the hardships of being a soldier there, but a bone-deep understanding of the toll that a seemingly endless war has taken on ordinary Afghans who have known no other reality for decades."--Michiko Kakutani "New York Times "

""Green on Blue" is a standout both for its setting and for the austere grace of its prose. But what sets the novel apart in the annals of American war literature is its daring shift in perspective: It's written not from the point of view of an American soldier, but that of an Afghan boy...With understated grandeur, a portrait of Afghanistan in microcosm takes shape, one in which profit and peace are at odds, lines of allegiance are constantly being redrawn, and coming-of-age entails a swift initiation into moral ambiguity and brutality...The result is compassionate, provocative, and alive to the tremendous narrative risk involved in taking on the gaze of the "other" try imagining "Apocalypse Now" from the perspective of the South Vietnamese."--Megan O'Grady "VOgue.com "

"The chief pleasures of Ackerman's novel derive from its striking descriptions of men at war...Like all novels written in skilled, unadorned prose about men and women of action, this novel will probably be compared to Hemingway's work. In this case, however, the comparison seems unusually apt...Elliot Ackerman has done something brave as a writer and even braver as a soldier: He has touched, for real, the culture and soul of his enemy."--Tom Bissell "New York Times Book Review "