Dark At The Crossing

"Of all the new generation of vet writers, Elliot Ackerman has seen the most war – he earned a Silver Star in the second battle of Fallujah and later hunted Taliban with Afghan irregulars along the Pakistani border. But he skipped the traditional war-story-debut-novel in favor of more daring stuff in both his first novel, and now again with Dark At The Crossing. The book follows Haris, an Iraqi-American at the blurry edge of the war in Syria, where contractors, militants, aid workers and refugees wait and conspire on the Turkish side of the border. He catches every detail of the exile purgatory, where most residents don’t know whether they’re moving toward heaven or hell, or which direction is which. With the shooting war echoing from the south, Ackerman looks at the civil war inside his characters as they fall into an uncertain love triangle. It’s a great read and timely."