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End of Active Service

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What to expect

A raw and rampaging debut novel from the author of the “inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining” (NYTBR) memoir Eat the Apple—examining the war after the war for US veterans: returning home.

What was it like? It’s the only thing anyone wants to know about war—and the last thing Corporal Dean Pusey wants to talk about, at least not with one of these fat and happy civilians crowding the bar. Dean is two months free from the Marine Corps, and life back in his Indiana hometown is anything but peaceful.

That’s when the woman next to him offers to buy him a drink. Max is nice—gorgeous, funny, easy to talk to. Dean doesn’t dare tell her about the sheep he took care of on his first deployment, only to watch it get torn to shreds by a pack of wild dogs; or the naked, shivering Iraqi teenager his platoon detained after an IED blast. He needs to leave all that behind and become a new person—the kind who sticks around when Max gets pregnant. He’s white-knuckling it, trying to keep calm, and it’s not easy. Harder still when his friend and comrade Ruiz starts showing up all over the place like he’s been invited—like he didn’t die a year ago. He has Max now, he has his baby daughter, River. He doesn’t have time for ghosts.

With his signature black humor, hard-eyed honesty, and stylistic ingenuity, Matt Young delivers a novel that turns the typical war story on its head—beginning not with enlistment but with retirement, and locating the life-or-death stakes not in battle, but in the domestic theaters of fatherhood, family, forgiveness, and love.

Critics Review

  • Matt Young brilliantly captures the peculiar mixture of pride and sorrow that comes with fighting in our modern wars, and the difficult work of reintegration into civilian life. But more than simply a war story, End of Active Service is a powerful and deeply affecting portrait of the challenges of life and fatherhood, with characters you come to care for deeply.

    Phil Klay, National Book Award winning author of Redeployment

  • Young writes with howling musicality, bounding between Iraq and Indiana with the dexterity of a pro and the mania of truth. The effect is irresistible, hilarious, and poignant when least expected. At once a raw portrait of trauma and a takedown of macho brouhaha, End of Active Service delivers shock and awe on every page.

    Jakob Guanzon, National Book Award longlisted author of Abundance

  • Warning: this is not a war story. It’s the story after the war, the story of rebuilding, painful and raw, brutal in its bald honesty, beautiful too, and startlingly funny. So intimate you’ll feel it in your body like a gut-punch, with a voice both taunting and tender. As we’re told in the novel’s incredible opening, this is a love story, though you won’t find it all that familiar. A brilliant, necessary debut novel that surprised me again and again. I didn’t want it to end.

    Katie Flynn, author of Island Rule

  • A blistering account of America’s forever-war with itself. End of Active Service begins where our mythology leaves off, and in remarkable, machine-gun-fire prose reveals the deep wounds we all carry. An important book for our time.

    Maxim Loskutoff, author of Ruthie Fear and Come West and See

  • Life after war is just another kind of war for the narrator of Matt Young’s extraordinary, compelling, and brutally insightful debut novel, End of Service. Written in spare, poetic prose, Young’s unflinching immersion in the life of his traumatized protagonist makes the war novel new again.

    Laura Sims, author of How Can I Help You

  • Young is a frank, funny and mercilessly self-lacerating narrator. His writing is entertaining and experimental . . . Eat the Apple is a brilliant and barbed memoir of the Iraq War.

    Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air on EAT THE APPLE

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