Theodore Weesner (The Car Thief) launches his first new novel in fifteen years: Carrying, a gritty and realistic work that hurls the reader into the detonating heart of the first Iraqi war. (Kuwait)
With unapologetic candor, Weesner navigates literary cherry bombs surrounding young warrior and South Boston native Jimmy Murphy, who pens a secret journal to his old English Professor, Herman Roth. Weesner’s contrapuntal narrative elegantly weaves two gripping journeys between Roth’s struggles with a waning academic career and Jimmy’s life as a soldier pulsating with rage, prejudice, and desire as he confronts personal demons to become a top gunner in one of the U.S.’s elite fighting groups.
Jimmy’s rapid rise through the ranks gives him a sense of purpose and direction in a war that swiftly becomes ruthless, but Iraq is transforming into a wasteland before his very eyes; one of burning oil wells layered with the stench of burned corpses as the 2nd Cav obliterate the Iraqi army. And when it’s finally over, will he be able to leave it all behind?
This timely and well written novel inserts itself into the zeitgeist of the legions of young men and women who return to the U.S. but never quite leave the battlefield, carrying the deepest wounds of heartbreak, shock, fear, and aggression, and how one soldier comes of age in an era or terror and endless war.