Dark at the Crossing [Paperback]

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • NPR • The Christian Science Monitor • Military Times • Vogue • Bloomberg

Haris Abadi, a wayward Arab American with a conflicted past, has finally found his purpose: he will cross into Syria and join the fight against Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive regime. But before he can get there, he is robbed and abandoned on the Turkish side of the border. Fortunately for Haris, he is picked up by Amir, a charismatic revolutionary turned refugee. Amir’s wife, Daphne, is a beautiful, grief-stricken woman who shares Haris’s longing to make it into Syria—but for altogether different reasons. As he grows closer to the couple who rescued him, Haris must confront his own motivations and ask himself what kind of man—radical or idealist, hero or coward—he truly is.“One could argue that the most vital literary terrain in America’s overseas wars is now occupied not by journalists but by novelists...Elliot Ackerman is certainly one of those novelists...He has created people who are not the equivalents of the locally exotic subjects in your average NPR story, and he has used them to populate a fascinating and topical novel.”
—Lawrence Osborne,New York Times Book Review

“Ackerman, who lives in Istanbul and has written some fine reportage from the Turkish borderlands, knows Gaziantep well and sharply depicts its incongruities . . . He shows boldness and empathy in trying to envision modern conflagrations from foreign vantage points.”
—Sam Sacks,Wall Street Journal

“Ackerman’s eye for detail grounds this novel in a space that quickly transports readers into a world few Americans know . . .Dark at the Crossingis not only a fictional meditation on remorse, betrayal, love and loss, but also a joulÒ