End of Active Service

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents End of Active Service by Matt Young, read by Sam Rushton.

A raw and rampaging debut novel from the author of the “inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining” (NYTBR) memoir Eat the Apple—the last phase of 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

Debut novelist Young deftly maneuvers between Dean’s postdischarge life and the corrosive and brutalizing events of his military service and clearly conveys the jarring realities of transitioning from wartime to lifetime . . . humor and perceptive insights mark the storytelling; people he meets want to hear about his war experiences, but what they really want to do is to tell him about their own, or secondhand, war stories. Young . . . delivers a cleareyed, nonsentimental chronicle of the corrosive and far-reaching effects of war and its inevitable aftermath . . . War is hell, but Young shows us that what happens afterward can be worse.
Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Artful and piercing . . . an essential addition to the literature of war.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Young throws readers into Dean's wars with the same tough love as his outstanding memoir, Eat the Apple (2018), writing in rhythmic military shorthand to hypnotizing effect. Dean insists that he's telling us a love story, and in Young's utterly contemporary war novel, he's right, several times over.
Booklist
Young’s writing style is staccato, clipped, propulsive . . . the story of a young vet desperate to shed the habits of mind and body that were drilled into him . . . [End of Active Service] reinforces the personal consequences of war and violence: the heavy physical and psychological weight and the habits of mind that are so obdurate and hard to interrupt. Young creates and sustains an unbearable tension.
California Review of Books
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
Raw, disturbing, hilarious, and unsparing book . . . a brutally honest account of what it's like to be a Marine and fight in a war.
Vox on EAT THE APPLE
Perfectly captures that dichotomy of the American military - to protect individual freedoms, we must destroy our own individual freedoms - in beautiful, hilarious, horrifying prose.
The Seattle Review of Books on EAT THE APPLE
Piercingly explores what happens when a service member leaves the Marines and returns home . . . Young skillfully deploys repetition and immersive memories to amplify the toxic spirals of Dean's thoughts. End of Active Service is an unsparing, fist-clenching ride.
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