NEWS FROM THE RED DESERT

From the award-winning author of The Water in Between and Consumption, the definitive novel of the Afghanistan war - for readers of Phil Klay's Redeployment and Tim O'Brien

News From the Red Desert begins in late 2001, when everyone believes the war is already won and the Taliban defeated, then leaps late in the severely escalated conflict—into the mess, and death, and confusion. At its heart are the men and women who have come to Afghanistan to seek purpose, and adventure, and danger, by engaging in the most bewitching and treacherous of human pursuits: making war.

It's the story of Deirdre O'Malley, an American journalist who had been covering municipal politics when the airplanes went into the towers. Now a war correspondent, she has come to love the soldiers she covers and to grieve so hard over their wounds and their deaths she considers herself a member of the mission too. Embedded with Canadian infantry, she can't ignore the situation on the ground. Her loyalty toward her ex-lover, the American general who has taken command of the theatre, wavers as the war wavers, and the use of torture and the slaughter of civilians is brought to light. Fuelling the tension is a melancholy American supply sergeant who accidentally releases a trove of war porn online that sparks a furious hunt for the person who leaked it. Fearing arrest at any moment, he has stayed on too long in Kandahar for reasons he doesn't understand himself. Caught up in these currents are the Pakistanis who operate the Green Beans café on the Kandahar Airfield, led by optimist Rami Issay, who wants to lighten his customers' hearts (and make a success of his business) by running film and chess clubs in the only zone of recreation on the base. But the war intrudes even into the lives of the well-intentioned.

In a powerful climax that tests everyone's loyalty and faith, the essential chaos of violence asserts itself. Love and desire endure, but no-one escapes unscathed.

KEVIN PATTERSON grew up in Manitoba, and put himself through medical school by joining the Canadian army. Now a specialist in internal medicine, he practises in the Arctic and on Vancouver Island. His first book, a memoir called The Water in Between, was a Globe Best Book and an international bestseller. Country of Cold, his debut short fiction collection, won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize as well as the inaugural City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel, Consumption, and co-editor of Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of its Participants. He lives on Salt Spring Island, BC.