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
“Mr. Klay’s bravura novel homes in on the ground-level consequences of American interference in Colombia’s ongoing civil war and tumultuous peace process. But the engrossing local conflict is only part of the book’s revelatory, panoramic portrayal of the remote yet interconnected ways that American-sponsored wars are waged across the globe.” —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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book
One of the Wall Street Journal Ten Best Books of the Year
“Mr. Klay’s bravura novel homes in on the ground-level consequences of American interference in Colombia’s ongoing civil war and tumultuous peace process. But the engrossing local conflict is only part of the book’s revelatory, panoramic portrayal of the remote yet interconnected ways that American-sponsored wars are waged across the globe.” —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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"What happens when a novel becomes more than a novel? It becomes a prophecy. Phil Klay has written a prophecy." - Elliot Ackerman
"Phil Klay’s Missionaries is a big, rich, clear-eyed book about death and life; wise, compassionate, and, yes, as cynical as it needs to be when necessary, but full of vivid people caught up in that organized human violence which is our species’ haunting passion. I’ve maybe never read a war novel this good." - Ayad Akhtar
"Missionaries shook me to my core. Klay takes the reader into the heart of Colombian darkness; the abuses of power, the forgotten lives of girls and women and how quickly human dignity – and conscience – get eroded in extreme times. This is audacious, heart-breaking, epic fiction. It touched me greatly." - Mary Costello
"Phil Klay’s Missionaries has a sweep and incisiveness to it I had almost forgotten novels were capable of. I haven’t been so gripped by a book in years. It is immensely smart and farseeing, and utterly unsparing. Extraordinary." - Garth Greenwell
"If Redeployment was about what happened when we ship wars abroad, then Missionaries is what happens when war comes roaring right back. Expansive, explosive, and epic." - Marlon James
"Missionaries is an urgent, detailed, compassionate and quietly furious novel about America and her Forever Wars. Intensely readable, exciting, funny and heartbreaking - it will change you." - A L Kennedy
"This engaging and far-ranging novel is about the thorny battle for reconciliation in the midst of an endlessly-fought war. For all the tense geopolitics and violent special forces raids and guerilla warfare in Missionaries, Phil Klay’s true subject is the contested territory of the heart. It is here, in the novel’s poignant exploration of faith and parental love and uneasy moral compromises, that the cost of US military intervention is laid bare. A chilling and accomplished novel." - Kirstin Valdez Quade
"Phil Klay’s Missionaries is a big, rich, clear-eyed book about death and life; wise, compassionate, and, yes, as cynical as it needs to be when necessary, but full of vivid people caught up in that organized human violence which is our species’ haunting passion. I’ve maybe never read a war novel this good." - Ayad Akhtar
"Missionaries shook me to my core. Klay takes the reader into the heart of Colombian darkness; the abuses of power, the forgotten lives of girls and women and how quickly human dignity – and conscience – get eroded in extreme times. This is audacious, heart-breaking, epic fiction. It touched me greatly." - Mary Costello
"Phil Klay’s Missionaries has a sweep and incisiveness to it I had almost forgotten novels were capable of. I haven’t been so gripped by a book in years. It is immensely smart and farseeing, and utterly unsparing. Extraordinary." - Garth Greenwell
"If Redeployment was about what happened when we ship wars abroad, then Missionaries is what happens when war comes roaring right back. Expansive, explosive, and epic." - Marlon James
"Missionaries is an urgent, detailed, compassionate and quietly furious novel about America and her Forever Wars. Intensely readable, exciting, funny and heartbreaking - it will change you." - A L Kennedy
"This engaging and far-ranging novel is about the thorny battle for reconciliation in the midst of an endlessly-fought war. For all the tense geopolitics and violent special forces raids and guerilla warfare in Missionaries, Phil Klay’s true subject is the contested territory of the heart. It is here, in the novel’s poignant exploration of faith and parental love and uneasy moral compromises, that the cost of US military intervention is laid bare. A chilling and accomplished novel." - Kirstin Valdez Quade
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