A unique and eerily convincing masterwork, American War takes a scalpel to American politics, precisely dissecting it to see what would happen if their own policies were turned against them. The answer: inevitable, endless bloodshed.

In a disturbingly believable near future, the need for sustainable energy has torn the United States apart. The South wants to maintain the use of fossil fuels, even though the government in The North has outlawed them. Now, unmanned drones patrol the skies, and future martyrs walk the markets. For the first time in three hundred years, America is caught up in a civil war. Out of this turmoil comes Sarat Chestnut, a southern girl born into the ongoing conflict. At a displaced persons camp, a mysterious older man takes her under his wing, and while her family tries to survive, Sarat is made into a deadly instrument of war, with consequences for the entire nation.

Omar El Akkad's profile page

OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and journalist. Born in Egypt, he grew up in Qatar, until he moved to Canada with his family, and now lives in the United States. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Ferguson, New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, among many other locations around the world. He earned a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His debut novel, American War, was an international bestseller, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and was nominated for many others. What Strange Paradise, his second, won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

FINALIST FOR CBC CANADA READS
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE
"American War is an extraordinary novel. El Akkad's story of a family caught up in the collapse of an empire is as harrowing as it is brilliant, and has an air of terrible relevance in these partisan times." —Emily St. John Mandel, award-winning author of Station Eleven

"El Akkad has fashioned a surprisingly powerful novel—one that creates as haunting a postapocalyptic universe as Cormac McCarthy . . . and as devastating a look at the fallout that national events have on an American family as Philip Roth." —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"American War is a worthy first novel, thought-provoking, earnest and mostly well-wrought. It is at its best depicting the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances and how those ordinary people are . . . forever changed, and how some can become extraordinary or at least affect history. . . . El Akkad's formidable talent is to offer up a stinging rebuke of the distance with which the United States sometimes views current disasters, which are always happening somewhere else. Not this time." —Los Angeles Times
"American War is Omar El Akkad's first novel and it is masterful. Both the story and the writing are lucid, succinct, powerful and persuasive." —Globe and Mail
"This is not a comforting political message for Americans, whose homeland has largely remained free of the chaos and bloodshed experienced by other nations in the modern age. But comfort is exactly what El Akkad is writing against. . . . What if it happened here? American War asks us to imagine the uncomfortable." —Toronto Star

"El Akkad demonstrates a profound understanding of the corrosive culture of civil war, the offenses that give rise to new hypocrisies and mythologies, translating terrorists into martyrs and acts of despair into feats of heroism." —Washington Post
"El Akkad, an Egyptian-born journalist who's covered the war on terror, has a knack for giving [the language of oppression] as much of a heartbeat as possible. His imagined speeches, transcripts, history-book passages, censored letters and news stories feel accurate while highlighting institutional deceptions and omissions." —Mark Athitakis, Star Tribune
"It's a compelling narrative, one matched—surpassed, actually—by El Akkad's flawlessly executed backstory. . . . American War—its title, as slowly becomes apparent, is beautifully apt—covers past and present very well indeed." —Maclean's
"El Akkad . . . has an innate (and depressingly timely) feel for the textural details of dystopia; if only his grim near-future fantasy didn't feel so much like a crystal ball." —Entertainment Weekly

"Whether read as a cautionary tale of partisanship run amok, an allegory of past conflicts or a study of the psychology of war, American War is a deeply unsettling novel. The only comfort the story offers is that it's a work of fiction. For the time being, anyway." —Justin Cronin, New York Times

“American War, a work of a singular, grand, brilliant imagination, is a warning shot across the bow of the United States. Omar El Akkad has created a novel that isn’t afraid to be a pleasurable yarn as it delves into the hidden currents of American culture and extrapolates from them to envision a deeply tragic potential future.” —David Means, author of Hystopia
“Omar El Akkad’s urgent debut transmutes our society’s current dysfunction into a terrifying yet eerily recognizable future, where contemporary global and local conflicts have wreaked havoc on American soil. The threads between today and that future are his masterfully shaped characters. Their resilience, savagery, and humanity serve both as a portrait of who we are but also what we might very well become.” —Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing
“Omar El Akkad has created an American future that is both terrifying and plausible. In a world seared and flooded by global warming, the U.S. has fractured again into North and South. . . . Through the eyes of a young girl El Akkad lets us see the soul-crushing toll of war. It was only in the stunned minutes after I’d finished the novel that I realized he had also taught us how to make a consummate terrorist.”
—Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars and Celine
"American War avoids being a polemic. Its characters are too vivid and contradictory, its twists of plot too well constructed, for the novel to settle for familiar and obvious messages." —San Francisco Chronicle