The Yellow Birds
First edition cover image
|
|
| Author | Kevin Powers |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Oliver Munday |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction, Novel |
| Publisher | Little, Brown and Company |
|
Publication date
|
11 September 2012 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 226 |
| ISBN | |
The Yellow Birds is the debut novel from American writer, poet, and Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers. It was one of The New York Times's 100 Most Notable Books of 2012 and a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. It was awarded the 2012 The Guardian First Book Award, and the 2013 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Much of the novel draws upon Powers's experience serving a year as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq, from February 2004 to March 2005 after enlisting in the Army at the age of 17. After his honorable discharge, Powers enrolled in Virginia Commonwealth University, where he graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor's degree in English. He holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry.
Powers has said that the novel took him about four years to write. He also comes from a military family as "his father and grandfathers both served, and his uncle was a Marine."
With regard to the autobiographical elements of the novel, Powers says: "The core of what Bartle goes through, I empathised with it. I felt those things, and asked the same questions: is there anything about this that's redeeming; does asking in itself have value? The story is invented, but there's a definite alignment between his emotional and mental life and mine."
The Yellow Birds begins: "The war tried to kill us in the spring" and follows Pvt. John Bartle, the novel's protagonist and narrator, in Al Tafar, Iraq; Fort Dix, New Jersey; Kaiserslautern, Germany; the author's and narrator's hometown of Richmond, Virginia; and Fort Knox, Kentucky spanning from December 2003 to April 2009.
...
Wikipedia