The Good Lieutenant

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Boston Globe and Refinery29

On the outskirts of Baghdad, Lieutenant Emma Fowler's platoon unwittingly rolls into a buried maze of IEDs--and their Humvee is blasted into a shrapnel-torn wreck.

From this catastrophic moment, The Good Lieutenant unspools backward in time as Fowler and her platoon are guided into disaster by suspicious informants and questionable intelligence, their mission the result of a previous snafu in which a soldier was kidnapped by insurgents. The novel unfolds from points of view that are not customarily included in war coverage--a tenacious female officer, jaded career soldiers, and Iraqis both innocent and not so innocent.

Brilliantly told by an acclaimed writer at the top of his form, Whitney Terrell's The Good Lieutenant is a gripping, insightful, and necessary novel about a war that is proving to be the defining tragedy of our time.

WHITNEY TERRELL is the author of The Huntsman, a New York Times notable book, and The King of Kings County. He is the recipient of a James A. Michener-Copernicus Society Award and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. He was an embedded reporter in Iraq during 2006 and 2010 and covered the war for the Washington Post Magazine, Slate, and NPR. His nonfiction has additionally appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Observer, The Kansas City Star, and other publications. He teaches creative writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and lives nearby with his family.