Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Couverture souple

'Brilliant: funny, involving, warm-hearted, a book for our times' Rachel Cook Observer

'A fierce, exhilarating novel about the Iraq war ... And it is terrific: eloquent and angry, funny and poignant' Theo Tait Guardian

'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is not merely good; it's Pulitzer Prize-quality good ... A bracing, fearless and uproarious satire of how contemporary war is waged' San Francisco Chronicle

'Breathtaking, beautiful, startlingly authentic' Patrick Hennessey, Author Of The Junior Officers' Reading Club

'This book will be the Catch-22 of the Iraq War ... Fountain applies the heat of his wicked sense of humor while you face the truth of who we have become' Karl Marlantes

'As close to the Great American Novel as anyone is likely to come these days - an extraordinary work that captures and releases the unquiet spirit of our age, and will probably be remembered as one of the important books of this decade' Madison Smartt Bell

'Passionate, irreverent, utterly relevant, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk offers an unforgettable portrait of a reluctant hero. Ben Fountain writes like a man inspired and his razor sharp exploration of our contemporary ironies will break your heart' Margot Livesey

'Too often nowadays even rather good novels fail to excite me - I suppose over the years I've read too many of them - which means that those which do are Events in my life. And now I can add Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk to the list. A blazingly good novel and a vital, important book about war and the world we live in' Diana Athill

'Ben Fountain's novel is an exhilarating, funny, heartbreaking glimpse into the life of a young soldier and into experiences in which we are complicit - but about which we understand nothing. And it finds its mark in an incredibly personal way. The book has left me reeling' Colin Firth

'It is a masterpiece of war literature, which is always to say, of anti-war literature' Australian Review

'Brilliantly done ... grand, intimate, and joyous' Geoff Dyer

'[An] inspired, blistering war novel...Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn's surreal game day experience' New York Times

'A masterful echo of Catch-22, with war in Iraq at the center ... a masterful gut-punch of a debut novel ... There's hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain's sympathetic, damning and structurally ambitious novel. By the novel's end, we're forced to reassess what it means to 'support the troops'. Does it simply mean letting them know they're in our prayers as we send them back into battle and go about our business? Does it mean turning them into gaudy celebrities? Or could there perhaps be a more honorable and appropriately humble way to commemorate their service? Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk asks us to consider the uncomfortable possibility that we don't really know the answer anymore' Washington Post

'Fountain's excellent first novel follows a group of soldiers at a Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving Day...Through the eyes of the titular soldier, Fountain creates a minutely observed portrait of a society with woefully misplaced priorities. A pitch-perfect ear for American talk drives the satire' New Yorker

'Seething, brutally funny...[Fountain] leaves readers with a fully realized band of brothers...Fountain's readers will never look at an NFL Sunday, or at America, in quite the same way' Sports Illustrated

'[T]he shell-shocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five...War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity' Kirkus Review

'I love this' --Nick Hornby

A finalist for the National Book Award!

A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents at "the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal"—three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America's most sought-after heroes. For the past two weeks, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on this chilly and rainy Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of America's Team, the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny's Child.

Among the Bravos is the Silver Star–winning hero of Al-Ansakar Canal, Specialist William Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texas native. Amid clamoring patriots sporting flag pins on their lapels and Support Our Troops bumper stickers on their cars, the Bravos are thrust into the company of the Cowboys' hard-nosed businessman/owner and his coterie of wealthy colleagues; a luscious born-again Cowboys cheerleader; a veteran Hollywood producer; and supersized pro players eager for a vicarious taste of war. Among these faces Billy sees those of his family—his worried sisters and broken father—and Shroom, the philosophical sergeant who opened Billy's mind and died in his arms at Al-Ansakar.

Over the course of this day, Billy will begin to understand difficult truths about himself, his country, his struggling family, and his brothers-in-arms—soldiers both dead and alive. In the final few hours before returning to Iraq, Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those missing, face a heart-wrenching decision, and discover pure love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years.

Poignant, riotously funny, and exquisitely heartbreaking, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a devastating portrait of our time, a searing and powerful novel that cements Ben Fountain's reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.