Off the X

by Mark McDonald

“The product of high intelligence and passionate conviction, alternately mournful and gripping, and occasionally hilarious. It’s also a ripping good story.” --- Soho Weekly News The author, a veteran war correspondent and former prize-winning reporter with The New York Times, has called his new novel “asymmetric journalism,” a new and original genre that melds real-time reporting with literary fiction. A bright and privileged young American, Micah Ford, is battered by the great tragedies of modern America. He loses his mother, a nurse, to AIDS. His father is killed on 9/11, and a grandfather dies in Katrina. A girlfriend is murdered in a hate-crime in the Deep South. Micah’s biography overlaps his country’ They’re both suffering from post-traumatic stress. Both are squarely “on the X.” Enlisting in the Army, he discovers a new clarity, nothing less than a new life, through the extreme violence he encounters during a secret mission against ISIS in Iraq. Torture, love, betrayal, a miracle or two, luck, American swagger, Islamist brutality, and a final compass-reading from valor --- it’s all in here, in a book that one reviewer has found “alarming, poignant and nothing short of brilliant.” Another critic called it “war porn, or war smut, something akin to pictures of flag-draped coffins returning colorful and descriptive, but also prurient.”

292 pages, Paperback

Published October 20, 2015

Reviews

[Jane Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the brave of heart

This book takes you inside a military operation so secret, so ghastly in conception and execution that my mind balked at imagining it. Yet I found it to be absolutely possible and probably true. There is a long Prologue which introduces us to Micah, the genius polyglot protagonist, but at the heart of the book is the U.S. military operation.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know the author well, and I heartily recommend his first venture into literary fiction.