Prisoners of War

Set in a Mississippi farming town, Steve Yarbrough’s new novel is–as theWashington Postsaid of hisVisible Spirits–a “skillful interweaving of complicated relationships to family and history,” here related in a story of wars both global and local, and the prisoners of each. In 1943, Dan Timms awaits being drafted away from the memory of his father’s recent suicide, the guilt and sorrow of his mother, and the protection of his enterprising uncle, for...
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Set in a Mississippi farming town, Steve Yarbrough’s new novel is–as theWashington Postsaid of hisVisible Spirits–a “skillful interweaving of complicated relationships to family and history,” here related in a story of wars both global and local, and the prisoners of each. In 1943, Dan Timms awaits being drafted away from the memory of his father’s recent suicide, the guilt and sorrow of his mother, and the protection of his enterprising uncle, for whom he and a young black man called L.C. drive a “rolling store” through the Delta, its plantations now worked by German soldiers whose fighting days are over. As they would seem to be for Dan’s friend Marty Stark, returned mysteriously from the front and reassigned to guard men he had been trained to kill. But for L.C., a danger more immediate than the one looming overseas is the society into which he was born . . . With escape a fervent dream shared by almost everyone,Prisoners of Waris a vivid examination of an eternal conflict–between the powerful and those with only the pride of the as-yet-unvanquished–and a subtle, disturbing portrait of a nation at war with itself.