A National Book Award finalist for Dark at the Crossing, former Marine Ackerman tells the heartbreaking story of a relationship caught up in the aftermath of war. Eden and Mary are happily married with a child on the way when Eden is deployed for his second tour in Iraq. After an accident leaves Eden's best friend dead and Eden barely alive, he returns home on a stretcher covered in severe burns and is unable to return to the life he'd led before. Mary, meanwhile, cares for their infant daughter and must wrestle with the hard decision of whether to take Eden off of life support. She is full of resentment and guilt, unable to forgive herself for letting him leave for war. Eden's best friend narrates-caught in limbo between this world and the next-and hovers over their lives, connecting to both in unexpected ways. He offers a bird's-eye view of the pain and suffering of both Mary and Eden as they struggle separately to make peace with Eden's imminent death. This is a deeply touching exploration of resentment, longing, and loss among those who volunteer to fight and the loved ones left behind. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Wounded terribly in Iraq three years ago, a soldier awaits his death in a burn center in San Antonio, and we learn of his fate through a surprising, unconventional, and risky narrative strategy.Eden is the soldier who just barely survived when his Humvee hit a pressure plate in the Hamrin Valley, and the narrator is a fellow soldier who was killed in the same explosionand who considers Eden's fate worse than his own. Because the narrator is dead, he is granted a kind of omniscience that would be denied someone living; for example, he has access to what passes through Eden's mind even as Eden is immobilized and practically catatonic. We learn that he and Eden had been friends in the service, had taken some of the same special training, and had been deployed together. Through a series of flashbacks we also learn of the narrator's attraction to Eden's wife, Mary, who in the present is grieving over Eden's hopelessly burned body and is worried about exposing her 3-year-old daughter to Eden's insentience. Mary is faced with the morally difficult decision of whether or not to release Eden from his suffering, a strategy urged on her by Gabe, a gruff but caring nurse. Ackerman skillfully weaves his story across chapters that alternate between the grim reality of the burn center and Eden's more robust past, where we discover that he and Mary had difficulty conceiving a child, a tension exacerbated by the narrator's growing attraction to Mary. We're informed that Mary and the narrator inhabit a "space that is empty and white, waiting for [Eden]....We both wonder what will happen to us when he finally goes." The poignancy arises out of the fact that they both love Eden in their own way.An affecting, spare, and unusual novel. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Ackerman's (2017 National Book Award finalist for Dark at the Crossing) latest might be just three and a half hours long, but the dramatic effects will surely last longer. -MacLeod Andrews-his voice slightly growly, controlled enough as if control is necessary-narrates from the omniscient viewpoint of a dead man, waiting for his best friend to die. Eden Malcolm has been reduced to basically a 70-pound torso, trapped in a San Antonio burn center, sent home from Iraq after surviving an IED blast that killed his best friend-who now tells both their stories, along with that of Eden's wife, Mary, who's spent most of the past three years by his hospital bed. Before the latest deployment, before the explosion, Eden and Mary had been desperate to conceive, Mary more so because a baby was supposed to keep Eden home. Over the "days, weeks, months, years, lying there, not being allowed to just die," the three-part past, the two-part present, the solo future to come (albeit with child) get chillingly revealed-of love, hope, betrayal, desperation, dedication, and suffocation. -VERDICT A superb novel further enhanced by an exemplary reader; a timely acquisition for all libraries. ["With sparse prose and a deft pen, Ackerman writes a profound meditation on the liminal space between our past, present, and future": LJ 9/1/18 starred review of the Knopf hc; 2018 LJ Best Literary Fiction.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

one hopes that with the publication of his masterly third novel, "Waiting for Eden," Elliot Ackerman will help put to rest the current age of maximalism in American fiction. (1 doubt he intended to do so with this brilliant volume, but so it goes.) Rachel Cusk's "Outline" trilogy and Jenny Offill's "Dept, of Speculation" are recent novels with reasonable page counts that have created similarly shimmering portraits of humans at rest and fury. In his short novel, Ackerman accomplishes what a mountain of maximalist books have rarely delivered over tens of thousands of pages and a few decades: He makes pure character-based literary art, free of irony, free of authorial self-aggrandizement, dedicated only to deeply human storytelling. "Waiting for Eden" is a journey through the traumas, betrayals and ecstasies of contemporary warfare and the multiple lives touched and sometimes shattered by one combat injury or death. Be forewarned, there is more trauma here than ecstasy, yet there is also grace and wonder. Ackerman accomplishes so much in so few pages that the book feels nearly unclassifiable. ft is a war novel, certainly, and a wisely observed marriage drama, and a novel of friendship, duty and failure, ft's a precise study of the American underclass that mostly fills the ranks of our armed services. There is some Carveresque kitchen sink stuff, pancakes and hidden cigarette butts and all; and some Salterian love and sex and lies; and the writer pulls off a bit of narrative absurdity of the sort perfected most often by Joy Williams. The storytelling also feels so blue-flame true that one thinks of the war reporting of C. J. Chivers, Anthony Shadid and Marie Colvin. That's a lot of writers surfing these pages, but "Waiting for Eden" is original and singular - not burdened by influence but energized by it. The novel's setup is somewhat mad, and marvelously simple: Three years ago our narrator died in combat in the Hamrin Valley of Iraq: "I was sitting next to Eden and luckier than him when our Humvee hit a pressure plate, killing me and everybody else, him barely surviving." When your dead narrator claims he's luckier than the injured Marine whose story he's about to tell, get ready for a deep dive into pathos, regret and longing. The theme of "only one came back" is not uncommon in the canon of war stories, but here the lone survivor is too severely injured to tell his story, so Ackerman hands the narration to an omniscient member of the dead platoon. This inventive tweak offers Ackerman point-of-view and narrative time and space options that he engages with brio. By boldly situating his narrative omniscience in a ghost (or corpse, or spirit - I'm unsure what to call the narrator), Ackerman immediately achieves uncanny authority. The reader's own "waiting for Eden" becomes an obsession. (Yes, there might be some Beckett here too: Whom or what are we waiting for, all of us?) This omniscience offers privileged views of Eden's medevac back to the United States (those few pages alone constitute an entire tragedy, as a less-injured man dies because the two nurses on the plane spend all their energy and resources resuscitating Eden), Eden in the burn unit, Eden and the narrator training for combat, Eden and his wife, Mary, entertaining the narrator with a home-cooked meal. (Eden and Mary - yes, you might get biblical with it, if that's your style.) The time frame is loose, yet all the moves are determined and distinct, each serving the story in surprising, thrilling ways. When the bachelor narrator leaves his Servicemembers' Group Life Insurance to Mary, it first looks impulsive and desperate, and then insidious, but that act is finally understood as a generous and angelic last rite by a young Marine who more often than not ate Chinese takeout alone in the barracks. In addition to waiting, there is counting: Eden wishes to be counted among the death tolls tallied by both the narrator and Mary, who wonders where on the roster Eden's name will land: "Slowly she changed her mind about what his number might be. But she always knew he'd have a number.... For in the end it would always be the war that killed him." Early on we are told that Eden, the bedridden, formerly strapping 220-pound combat Marine, now weighs 70 pounds. Ackerman wisely avoids the laundry list of injuries he suffered. We can guess; Eden is housed in a burn center in San Antonio, his physical totality a fraction of what it was: "He's had a lot of infections, and they've cut all of him off up to the torso.... I don't think anyone really knows what to call him, except for Mary. She calls him her husband." Mary is a good wife, a loving wife. She's not running the base wives' club, but she understands Eden's need to serve his country. She also wants a baby. The couple made an agreement that if she got pregnant, he wouldn't go back to war. But intimacy is difficult while Eden fights his ghosts from an earlier deployment. Or is he just holding out so he can redeploy? Still, a child is conceived, and her hair is red like flames. The birth allows Ackerman to explore conflicted, confused true love in such elegant and humane ways that you will come to question everything you think you know about the meanings of romance and fidelity. WHATEVER PRESENT ACTION exists in the novel happens over a single Christmas holiday, when Mary, after three years, finally leaves Eden's bedside to visit their daughter, who now lives with Mary's mother. Some critics might call "Waiting for Eden" a retelling of Dalton Trumbo's antiwar classic "Johnny Got His Gun." That would be unfair to both writers for a multitude of reasons, Ackerman's apolitical stance first among them. But the younger author does make at least one wry, essential and tragicomic homage to the ringing telephone that begins "Johnny": When Mary travels to see their daughter, she accidentally leaves her cellphone charging in Eden's room, just behind his head. The ringing phone as Mary tries to locate it from her mother's house will rip Eden from the far depths of consciousness into a paranoid phantasmagoria of cockroaches. Eden has always hated bugs, and they are at the center of one of the book's key betrayals. From his hospital bed he clocks a cockroach stalking him from across the room: "Eden didn't know the name for a cockroach anymore, but he knew that its hard-backed shell and thorny legs could run a number on him." Is that Kafka's Gregor Samsa haunting this novel? Maybe. The ringing behind Eden's head convinces him that an army of cockroaches is invading his room to annihilate what remains of his body. In an infinite and inhumane technology loop, his panic causes the shift nurse to treat his extreme response as cardiac arrest, which in turn causes her to call Mary's cellphone to tell her Eden is going into cardiac arrest, which causes even more ringing and more physiological anguish for Eden. It's almost a gag out of "I Love Lucy." Except it's not. Even though you shouldn't, you will laugh. There is not a lot of actual death in "Waiting for Eden," except for the poor kid on Eden's medevac who's suffered the most humiliating of injuries: "The kid had been shot in the ass." The message is this: You never know what you're fighting for. You never know what might kill you or when you'll die. The senior nurse, Gabe, is a veteran war medic who takes an interest in helping Eden see out his Morse code plea for the "END." Years removed from his own deployment, Gabe learns "it wasn't too little time that was the enemy but too much. For in the end, it was time that turned all his friends' fractures to breaks. And for his friends, the moments from their saving to their ends became a list of torments caused by him." The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq coincided with and fueled a new era in combat-trauma medical technology and techniques: Tens of thousands of men and women who would have died in other conflicts returned home, and continue to do so, with wounds no one should have to cope with. But cope they do, for days, weeks, months, years. No one but the injured and their families keeps track of those days. Ackerman tells us all: Count and look. Ackerman's literary career has had a prolific start; he's written two prior acclaimed novels and a collection of essays and letters, all since 2015. His nominal topics have been modern wars in the Middle East, but the micro-level power of his unadorned and direct prose lies in no less than an attempt to contain and dramatize the darkness and light of our souls. He constantly asks: How do we love and why? Why must we so often fail as lovers, friends, citizens? Yet against his wartime backdrops of waste and destruction, he is astonishingly optimistic about his fellow man and the small acts of kindness that just might make us persevere in spite of it all, in life and in novels. To identify this book as a novel seems inadequate: "Waiting for Eden" is a sculpture chiseled from the rarest slab of life experience. The sculptor's tools are extreme psychological interrogation and clear artistic vision. It is a vision from which we might discover some new knowledge about war and being - perhaps even regain a moral core. There is more trauma here them ecstasy, yet there is also grace and wonder. Anthony swofford is a former Marine and the author of "Jarhead."

*Starred Review* In this gorgeously constructed short novel, Ackerman (Dark at the Crossing, 2017) focuses on a marriage between a soldier, Eden Malcolm, and his wife, Mary. In taut, detached prose that is rich in symbolism, the novel begins with Eden's dramatic return from Iraq, where he has been injured beyond all recognition. Mary comes immediately to his side, heavily pregnant. The scene of much of the novel is the San Antonio burn unit in which Eden resides. In short sections that flit between Eden before the explosion and his existence after, Ackerman, in a mysterious narrative voice, describes how Mary navigates grief, loss, motherhood, and what it means to be married to someone barely alive. Both Eden's and Mary's fears and foibles are richly explored to create a deeply moving portrayal of how grief can begin even while our loved ones still cling to life. In this unique Afghanistan and Iraq Wars novel, which joins a growing genre that includes Kevin Powers' Yellow Birds (2012) and Phil Klay's Redeployment (2014), Ackerman's focus on a single family makes the costs of war heartbreakingly clear, as does his drawing emotion and import from the smallest of acts with incredible skill. Many will read this wonderful novel in a single sitting.--Alexander Moran Copyright 2018 Booklist