Filigree

Praise for A Line in the Sand

“Powers has done it again.A Line in the Sand has it all: a kickass mystery with classic police procedural elements, originally drawn and memorable characters, but, most of all, a story with a huge heart and an underlying message that is sure to resonate widely. Enjoy the latest from a superb storyteller.”
—David Baldacci, author of The 6:20 Man

“Sure to rank among the year’s best thrillers, A Line in the Sand is a tense, twisting, and thoughtful story of the intersection between grief and greed — and the human lives crushed in the middle. Kevin Powers writes with uncommon grace, delivering the rare novel that is both propulsive and contemplative, calling to mind writers as varied as Tim O’Brien and Michael Connelly.”
—Michael Koryta

“A riveting powerhouse of a book, A Line in the Sand pits two small town cops—and a mysterious Iraqi interpreter whose secrets have already gotten a lot of people killed—against corruption and violence at the highest levels of government. A spellbinding and totally original thriller; Kevin Powers has reinvented himself as novelist yet again.”
—Philipp Meyer

“A thriller with a conscience, A Line in the Sand lets you indulge in fast-paced action and chilling suspense and still feel that you’re helping to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice.”
—Adam Begley, The Times (UK)

“Powerful, cynical, and, on occasion, unexpectedly tender in its depiction of grief, A Line in the Sand is one of the best crime novels of the year.”
—Declan Burke, Irish Times

Praise for A Shout in the Ruins

“Gorgeous, devastating.”
—The New York Times

“In the course of just two novels, Kevin Powers has already become one of the most original and exciting voices of his generation, and A Shout in the Ruins is a singular triumph of a book.”
—NPR

“An enthralling tale.”
—Oprah.com, O’s Top Books of Summer

“A Shout in the Ruins is confirmation, if it were needed, that Kevin Powers is a writer of rare talent.”
—The Financial Times

“The book sizzles with authentic tragedy, realism and unreconciled memory…Powers has written a novel that demands we mourn as we learn.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Kevin Powers has written a harrowing, resonant civil war novel. A Shout in the Ruins again demonstrates the author’s nuanced understanding of conflict and its aftermath. Above all this troubling, stirring book is informed by Mr Powers’s deep understanding of war’s complexities, and of how people are broken and shaped by it.”
—The Economist

“A Shout in the Ruins — a novel bristling with carnage and tempered by mercy, born of combat and enriched by love — marks another triumph for Powers, who at 37 writes not only with intelligence but also with wisdom, and of whom further distinction can be expected.
—The Richmond Times-Dispatch

“With poetic and nimble language that brings to mind another student of literary violence, Cormac McCarthy, Powers, 37, creates a drama with deep roots in America’s struggles with race, sex and commerce.”
—The Dallas Morning News

“With A Shout in the Ruins, Powers — reared in Virginia and now settled in Austin — weaves a sense of history, introspection and soul-searching into his own confrontation with slavery’s hellish legacy. This book is a welcome addition to what is becoming, with increasing urgency, a national reawakening of the consequences of our violent racist roots.”
—The Texas Observer

“there is no mistaking the intensity of his vision and his ability to conjure up scenes…that stick in the mind. Powers…has written a novel that memorably illustrates not only the ways in which violence breeds further violence but also the unrelenting power of the past to shape the present.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)

“A Shout in the Ruins…confirms Powers as a significant talent.”
—Andrew Motion, The Guardian

“…reminiscent of Faulkner. An impressive novel of slavery, destruction, and the arduous difficulties of love.”
—Kirkus, starred review

“A masterly meditation on our unbreakable connection to a world predicated on cyclical violence.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“The Yellow Birds spoke powerfully to its moment, but A Shout in the Ruins illuminates an entire lost era…”
—Laird Hunt, Literary Review (UK)

“If, as I do, you hold your breath between publication of Cormac McCarthy novels for want of a tale of equal beauty and terror, relax and inhale. A Shout in the Ruins is certain to wrench the reader’s gut and heart, with ferocity and tenderness measured accordingly.”
—Roland Bisshop, Readings (Australia)

“lacerating and elegiac…possesses the same intimate, lyrical power as his haunting debut”
—BookPage

“Some passages in Powers’ second novel… unfold with a fable’s tragic inevitability, while specificity of setting and character, both strikingly described and original, will brand them into the reader’s consciousness…Beautifully formed sentences express unsettling truths about humanity, yet tendrils of hope emerge, showing how love and kindness can take root in seemingly barren earth.”
—Booklist

“A Shout in the Ruins brushes aside myth and romanticism for a clear-eyed look at America.”
—Shelf Awareness

“This is a powerful, provocative yet beautiful work that is sure to gather laurels come award season but is also, more importantly, one that will endure.  A spectacular achievement.”
—Bill Cusumano, Square Books (Oxford, MS)

“a beautiful, haunting story”
—Laurie Gillman, East City Bookshop (Washington, DC)

“Highly Recommending.”
—Jayne Guitart, Westwinds Bookshop (Duxbury, MA)

“A masterpiece. Powers has written a novel that includes all the ferocity, complexity, and racial violence of the American South, from its fall to its eventual rebirth.”
—Philipp Meyer

“Kevin Powers has seamlessly woven nineteenth and twentieth century lives to create a novel that resonates out of the past to address the most timely issues of America in our own century. The same striking language and contemplation of war and its aftermath that made The Yellow Birds such a lauded debut is on full display in A Shout in the Ruins. What an impressive novel.”
—Ron Rash

“A harrowing and lyrical epic in miniature, Powers has written a novel excavated from another time, but which speaks profoundly to this one.”
—Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing

Praise for Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

“Impressive in its sincerity and virtually unimpeachable in its distress… ”
—Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom

“Like the best war poets, Kevin Powers’ real subject is not the battle for land or governance, but the battle for one man’s soul. In dramatising that inner conflict, he achieves a poetry both urgent and universal.”
— Michael Symmons Roberts, winner of the 2013 Forward and Costa prizes

Praise for The Yellow Birds

“The All Quiet on the Western Front of America’s Arab wars.”
—Tom Wolfe

“The Yellow Birds is harrowing, inexplicably beautiful, and utterly, urgently necessary.”
—Ann Patchett

“A remarkable first novel…The Yellow Birds is brilliantly observed and deeply affecting: at once a freshly imagined bildungsroman about a soldier’s coming of age, a harrowing story about the friendship of two young men trying to stay alive on the battlefield in Iraq, and a philosophical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory…Extraordinary.”
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“This is a novel I’ve been waiting for. The Yellow Birds is born from experience and rendered with compassion and intelligence.”
—Alice Sebold

“Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds is written with an intensity which is deeply compelling; every moment, every memory, every object, every move, are conjured up with a fierce and exact concentration and sense of truth.”
—Colm Toibin

“Compelling, brilliantly written, and heart-breakingly true, The Yellow Birds belongs in the same category as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Thus far the definitive novel of our long wars in the Middle East; this book is certain to be read and taught for generations to come.”
—Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust

“A novel about the poetry and the pity of war…Powers writes with a rawness that brings the sights and smells as well as the trauma and decay of war home to the reader.”
—Kirkus

“Reading The Yellow Birds I became certain that I was in the presence of a text that will win plaudits, become a classic, and hold future narratives of the war to a higher standard….a superb literary achievement.”
—Chris Cleave

“Kevin Powers has delivered an exceptional novel from the war in Iraq, written in clean, evocative prose, lyric and graphic, in assured rhythms, a story for today and tomorrow and the next.”
—Daniel Woodrell

“Powers has created a powerful work of art that captures the complexity and life altering realities of combat service. This book will endure. Read it and then put it way up on that high rare shelf alongside Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien.”
—Anthony Swofford

“We haven’t just been waiting for a great novel to come out of the Iraq War, our 21st century Vietnam; we have also been waiting for something more important, a work of art that illuminates our flawed and complex and striving humanity behind all such wars. At last we have both in Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds.”
—Robert Olen Butler

“Thoughtful and analytical, the novel resonates as an accurate and deeply felt portrayal of the effects of post-combat syndrome as experienced by soldiers in the disorienting war in Iraq. ”
—Library Journal, starred review

“This moving debut from Powers (a former Army machine gunner) is a study of combat, guilt, and friendship forged under fire….Powers’s style and story are haunting.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review