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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Biography, Literature & Literary studies

I`D WALK WITH MY FRIENDS IF I COULD FIND THEM

Jesse Goolsby

In 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, and a debut novel from a writer to watch. Through the complex characters of I’D WALK WITH MY FRIENDS, especially the three war veterans at the heart of the novel, Jesse Goolsby captures the universality of life struggles, the vulnerability of being alive, and the violence that arrives even far from the battlefields. A veteran of the Air Force who served in Iraq in 2003, Jesse Goolsby brings his firsthand experience of war to the page. His stories have been published in numerous literary journals and also selected for the 2012 "Best Mystery Stories" published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In addition to pursuing his doctorate in writing, Goolsby is the fiction editor for the literary journal "War, Literature, & the Arts." He is also working on his next novel (under contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

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Book Published 2015-06-01 by Houghton Mifflin

Comments

The suggestive title contains this novel in miniature: a community of soldiers confronts harrowing choices on the battlefield and eventually faces loss, fragmentation, and meaninglessness in civilian life… By the end of the novel we realize the war has intimately shaped the men’s lives without giving them meaning…

Jesse Goolsby’s I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them offers a heartbreaking and very humane lens into the lives of those connected to war. I’d Walk... refuses to avert its gaze when confronted with the most difficult of situations, opting instead to follow the repercussions to their hard and gut-wrenching ends. Goolsby recognizes that the battlefield stretches far beyond the demarcations of a combat zone, or the borders of Afghanistan. That said, this is not a book about war—this is a book about the human heart. This is the news, rarely told, of the actual world we live in.

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.

Not only is Jesse Goolsby one of the very rare authors who writes with authoritative insight into the warfare of the 21st 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.

I just read the most satisfying novel in years, Jesse Goolsby’s I’d Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them. It is not just a war novel but rather an earthquake in your soul novel. That art that shakes you down. I am blown away.

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. While depicting realistic and personal images of the psychological traumas of war, he leaves... readers to draw their own conclusions.

I’d Walk with my Friends If I Could Find Them is a thrilling and inventive story told in snapshots that will grab you by the heart and stay with you long after you turn the last page.

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, multi-layered, brutally honest debut novel, is such a book, an antidote to our nation's disconnect from our misadventures overseas.