The Sandbox
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
This “gripping” and suspenseful novel of the Iraq War “will keep you turning the pages” (The New York Times).
Operating Base Cornucopia is a three-hundred-year-old fortress in the remote Iraqi desert where a few dozen soldiers wait for their next assignment, among them Pvt. Toby Durrant, a self-described “broke nobody.”
Then a deadly ambush touches off events that put Durrant in the middle of a far-reaching conspiracy. Insurgents massing in the nearby hills, a secretive member of military intelligence, an abandoned toy factory, and a mysterious, half-feral child—Durrant must figure out the links between them if he’s to survive. This blistering look at military life in “the sandbox” of Iraq is both a compelling mystery and a vivid evocation of an “isolated moonscape—a place as liable to produce hallucinations and heat exhaustion as it is to churn up sandstorms that last for days” (Los Angeles Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Zimmerman s remarkable debut succeeds both as a realistic portrayal of the current Iraq war from the American perspective and as an energetic thriller. Stationed at a remote and poorly equipped U.S. army base in the Iraqi desert, Pvt. Toby Durrant worries about his pregnant fianc e back home. After a remotely detonated bomb kills two soldiers, Toby s commander, Lieutenant Blankenship, recruits him to monitor the accuracy of a translator, and then to interrogate two Iraqi prisoners suspected of being involved in the attack. Well aware of his lack of qualifications, Toby, who made a number of bad choices as a civilian, can t help thinking something else is going on, especially after the prisoners turn up dead. His difficulties escalate with the arrival of a military intelligence officer, who asks him for information about Blankenship. Readers will empathize with the author s everyman narrator as Toby tries to survive while maintaining his humanity. Zimmerman is a talent to watch.
