The Yellow Birds

Author: Kevin Powers
List: Open Option
Category: war
Year of publication: 2012
Pages: 241
Goodreads: The Yellow Birds

“How is a community affected by the experience of one soldier coming home from the Iraq war? This novel is about friendship, loss, and survival through memories.” ~RookReading

Blurb

Everywhere John looks, he sees Murph.

He flinches when cars drive past. His fingers clasp around the rifle he hasn’t held for months. Wide-eyed strangers praise him as a hero, but he can feel himself disappearing.

Back home after a year in Iraq, memories swarm around him: bodies burning in the crisp morning air. Sunlight falling through branches; bullets kicking up dust; ripples on a pond wavering like plucked strings. The promise he made, to a young man’s mother, that her son would be brought home safely.

With The Yellow Birds, poet and veteran Kevin Powers has composed an unforgettable account of friendship and loss. It vividly captures the desperation and brutality of war, and its terrible after-effects. But it is also a story of love, of great courage, and of extraordinary human survival.

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