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Missionaries

A Novel

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book | One of the Wall Street Journal Ten Best Books of the Year
"Missionaries is a courageous book: It doesn’t shy away, as so much fiction does, from the real world.” —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The New York Times Book Review
“A sweeping, interconnected novel of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer . . . By taking a long view of the ‘rational insanity’ of global warfare, Missionaries brilliantly fills one of the largest gaps in contemporary literature.” The Wall Street Journal
The debut novel from the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment

A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord's safe house on the Venezuelan border. They're watching him with an American-made drone, about to strike using military tactics taught to them by U.S. soldiers who honed their skills to lethal perfection in Iraq. In Missionaries, Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives.
For Mason, a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, and Lisette, a foreign correspondent, America's long post-9/11 wars in the Middle East exerted a terrible draw that neither is able to shake. Where can such a person go next? All roads lead to Colombia, where the US has partnered with local government to keep predatory narco gangs at bay. Mason, now a liaison to the Colombian military, is ready for the good war, and Lisette is more than ready to cover it. Juan Pablo, a Colombian officer, must juggle managing the Americans' presence and navigating a viper's nest of factions bidding for power. Meanwhile, Abel, a lieutenant in a local militia, has lost almost everything in the seemingly endless carnage of his home province, where the lines between drug cartels, militias, and the state are semi-permeable.
Drawing on six years of research in America and Colombia into the effects of the modern way of war on regular people, Klay has written a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none. Missionaries is a window not only into modern war, but into the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies.
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    • Booklist

      Starred review from August 1, 2020
      National Book Award-winner Klay (Redeployment, 2014) displays his signature virtuosity in this richly textured, masterful mosaic of modern Colombia. A small village serves as both backdrop and microcosm of the country's ongoing turmoil. The struggle for survival is deftly juxtaposed with the struggle for power, and the varying gradations of each are explored through multiple perspectives with nuance, grace, and poignancy. Abel, a young boy who joins the revolutionary group that slaughtered his family, is recognized for his intelligence and quickly rises through the ranks. American journalist Lisette is burned out from covering war in the Middle East and asks to be reassigned to a good war in Colombia. Colonel Juan Pablo is a high-ranking government functionary whose daughter is enamored of Che Guevara. Each character is rendered in psychologically astute moral complexity and must interrogate his or her own complicity in a corrupt and often violent system. Ultimately, all are pawns in the chess match of deep-state machinations masquerading as diplomacy. As the characters' lives begin to intersect in a rewarding, yet tension-filled denouement, the author's prodigious skill and deep understanding of the region provide the scaffolding to explore essential questions of human dignity and sacrifice. A triumphant achievement that elevates Klay to the top echelon of contemporary writers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 17, 2020
      Klay’s ambitious debut novel (after the National Book Award–winning collection Redeployment) plunges the reader into war-torn Colombia, where allegiances are uncertain and tremendous violence is an everyday reality. The story follows the four characters: there is Abelito, a Colombian forcibly conscripted into a militia commanded by the infamous terrorist Jefferson, and who hopes to save the woman he loves from his murderous commandants. American journalist Lisette Marigny, meanwhile, is embedded in Afghanistan until she is dispatched to Bógota to report on gang activity, only to be kidnapped by guerrillas. En route from the Middle East is Mason, an Iraq War veteran and Special Forces medic reassigned to fight paramilitary narcos in Colombia, which he naively imagines will be a “good war.” He befriends Juan Pablo, a weary commando who frets at being little more than a common mercenary and reflects on his early ambition to join the priesthood. Through these four protagonists, Klay unravels the complexity of interventionist American operations abroad, from Kabul to Medellín. While the novel suffers from a surfeit of tedious subplots and can feel overwhelmed by Klay’s exhaustive research, the prose is consistently staggering, whether in the characters’ moments of self-reflection or unflinching descriptions of brutality (“A chainsaw appeared, and suddenly everyone who had watched, confused and amazed... knew what was about to happen”). Even though the whole thing doesn’t quite tie together, it’s quite a ride. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME.

    • Library Journal

      October 16, 2020

      DEBUT NOVEL Missionary is defined broadly as one with a mission, and the missionaries in Klay's debut novel (after the National Book Award--winning short story collection Redeployment) converge in service of their various missions amid Colombia's violent narcopoliticalalchemy. The result is a driving narrative that is hard to put down. While the plot is more than compelling, characterization is the novel's strength. Klay spends roughly three-fourths of the book patiently fleshing out his "missionaries," making them worthy of our concern. They have families. They have psychologies. They have closely held principles that motivate them. Lisette, a young, passionate war correspondent, is kidnapped by a shadowy faction, one of many such factions roiling in Colombia's byzantine narcotics chaos. Immediately, the ironically named Jefferson, a drug lord and petty tyrant, physically grotesque, brutish, but with an unlikely and mercurial streak of compassion, is suspected. Colombian special forces commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Pulido and aided by U.S. Army Sergeant Major Baumerlaunch a risky rescue attempt in which not always the right people are killed. VERDICT Incredibly detailed, based on research and the author's personal experience, this work rises above the level of generic action-thriller to that of literary art, joining such geopolitical forebears as VassilisVassilikos's Z and John le Carr�'s The Mission Song.--Michael Russo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

      Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from August 1, 2020
      A host of journalists, mercenaries, soldiers, and well-meaning innocents are thrust into a quagmire in Colombia. Klay's first novel, the follow-up to Redeployment, his stellar 2014 story collection about U.S. soldiers in Iraq, gives his concerns about intractable violence a broader scope. Early on, he introduces characters in alternating chapters: Among them are Abel, a young foot soldier in the gruesome battles among drug cartels, soldiers, and guerrillas in northern Colombia circa 1999; Lisette, a jaded journalist covering the war in Afghanistan; Juan Pablo, a Colombian military officer hoping to shepherd his country to a deal ending decades of conflict; and Mason, a former medic in Afghanistan now serving as a Special Forces Liaison in Colombia. By 2016 these people's lives will intertwine, but not before Klay has gone deep into the violence and fogs of confusion they witness and sometimes create. In Colombia, Abel witnesses a defiant mayor get strapped to a piano and chainsawed in half; Mason hastily patches up the wounded in similarly visceral scenes. So it's clear things will be messy when Lisette requests to be transferred to "any wars right now where we're not losing" and is sent to Colombia. The challenge before any serious war novelist is to bring order to chaos without succumbing to a tidy narrative. It's to Klay's credit that he creates ambiguity not through atmospheric language or irony (Redeployment had its share of Heller-esque gallows humor) but through careful psychological portraits that reveal how readily relationships grow complicated and how even good intentions come undone in the face of humanity's urge to violence. That means plotlines get convoluted in the late stages, but the dispiriting conclusion is crystal clear: It's not just that war is hell, but that war brings hellishness to everything. An unflinching and engrossing exploration of violence's agonizing persistence.

      COPYRIGHT(2020) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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