Description:
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Yellow Birds comes a gorgeous, haunting love story set in the Virginia mountains and on the battlefields of World War I France.
Ewer's Rock, Virginia, 1917. Roy Young is restless, eager to leave this isolated rural valley for university and return with the technical knowledge to modernize his family's farm and bring them properly into the twentieth century.
Samantha Hatton, the minister's daughter and Roy's best friend since childhood, knows that both Roy and the town expect them to marry. But Samantha, a daring and ambitious young woman, hungers for more.
Above them on the mountain, tending to a lost herd of cattle, is silent Ennis Duke, the mysterious wild boy whose arrival in the valley will upend Ewer's Rock's understanding of itself and its place in the world.
Within a year, the lives of these three young people will be dramatically transformed. America has joined the Great War, and Roy and Ennis feel duty-bound to join the fight. In the crucible of conflict, thousands of miles from the familiarity of home, the two men forge a fierce bond. Meanwhile, back in Virginia, Samantha's love and courage endure unthinkable sacrifice in a corner of the world fractured by violence.
With the spare and exquisite prose and the profound insight that made The Yellow Birds a landmark work of American fiction, Kevin Powers illuminates the savage, complex, and timeless bonds of loyalty, honor, and heroism. Children of the Wild captures what it means to be human in times of loss--and how, even in darkness, the light of friendship and love endures.
Brief description: Kevin Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, The Guardian First Book Award, the Prix Littéraire du Monde Prix Étranger, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, among other prizes, and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He was a James A. Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin from 2009-2012 and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. A US Army veteran of the Iraq war, he lives on Florida's First Coast with his family.
Review Quotes:
"The author, himself a Virginian and a combat veteran, skillfully weaves threads of love, friendship, and senseless death into a compelling and often emotional tale where the price of love is paid with sorrow. A deeply affecting novel."
- Kirkus (Starred Review)
""Kevin Powers has been quietly and methodically building a body of work that will rank him at the very head of his profession. I was captivated by The Yellow Birds, his first novel, but with his latest, Children of the Wild, he has raised the bar and shows the maturity of a seasoned writer ever more confident of his skills and subjects. The three dominant characters in the story set around World War I are Ennis, Roy and Samantha. Each are so well developed they alone could carry most novels. The fact that these three deeply carved bits of humanity occupy the same story is the reader's vast good fortune. You will take away many elements from the novel, but what struck me above all else was that Powers never falters in the belief in his creations' flawed humanity, the power of raw goodness, and the fact that redemption is open to any who genuinely seek it. It is a wonderful, poignant novel that deserves to be on as many shelves and reside in as many hearts as possible. I am proud to call him a fellow Virginian."" - David Baldacci, New York Times bestselling author of Nash Falls
"Kevin Powers has conjured out of the mists of the Virginia mountains a novel of extraordinary beauty and power. Children of the Wild is about many things--the natural world, family, friendship, money, and war, most definitely war--but ultimately it's about the endless ways love finds to break us and make us. Powers can write; we've all known that since his era-defining debut The Yellow Birds, and Children of the Wild demonstrates his continuing rare mastery on every page." - Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk and Devil Makes Three
"Powers reinvents himself yet again. This time with a love story set at the dawn of the twentieth century, in which the son of a powerful family and his penniless best friend seek the hand of an enchanting young woman. Taking us from the lush mountains of Virginia to the battlefields of France, Children of the Wild reminds us of the best works of Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood." - Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust and The Son
"Kevin Powers's Children of the Wild is a heart-wrenching epic that takes readers from southwest Virginia to the battlefields of France to the alpine wilderness of the Bighorn Mountains and back again. Vast in its scope and intimate in its detail, Powers's newest novel tells a breathtaking story of three young people, coming together and coming of age in the early twentieth century. Children of the Wild is about friendship and love and figuring out what we believe in or if we believe in anything at all. Powers is great at writing war stories, but he's even better at writing stories about what war does to us while we're trying--with everything we've got--to hold onto our humanity. I inhaled this book." - Rachel Beanland, author of The House is on Fire