Children of the Wild

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On Sale June 9, 2026

From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Yellow Birds comes a gorgeous, haunting love story set in the Virginia mountains and on the battlefields of World War I France.

Ewer’s Rock, Virginia, 1917. Roy Young is restless, eager to leave this isolated rural valley for university and return with the technical knowledge to modernize his family’s farm and bring them properly into the twentieth century.

Samantha Hatton, the minister’s daughter and Roy’s best friend since childhood, knows that both Roy and the town expect them to marry. But Samantha, a daring and ambitious young woman, hungers for more.

Above them on the mountain, tending to a lost herd of cattle, is silent Ennis Duke, the mysterious wild boy whose arrival in the valley will upend Ewer’s Rock’s understanding of itself and its place in the world.

Within a year, the lives of these three young people will be dramatically transformed. America has joined the Great War, and Roy and Ennis feel duty-bound to join the fight. In the crucible of conflict, thousands of miles from the familiarity of home, the two men forge a fierce bond. Meanwhile, back in Virginia, Samantha’s love and courage endure unthinkable sacrifice in a corner of the world fractured by violence.

With the spare and exquisite prose and the profound insight that made The Yellow Birds a landmark work of American fiction, Kevin Powers illuminates the savage, complex, and timeless bonds of loyalty, honor, and heroism. Children of the Wild captures what it means to be human in times of loss—and how, even in darkness, the light of friendship and love endures.

Praise for Children of the Wild

“Kevin Powers has conjured out of the mists of the Virginia mountains a novel of extraordinary beauty and power. Children of the Wild is about many things–the natural world, family, friendship, money, and war, most definitely war–but ultimately it’s about the endless ways love finds to break us and make us. Powers can write; we’ve all known that since his era-defining debut The Yellow Birds, and Children of the Wild demonstrates his continuing rare mastery on every page.”
—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk and Devil Makes Three

“Powers reinvents himself yet again. This time with a love story set at the dawn of the twentieth century, in which the son of a powerful family and his penniless best friend seek the hand of an enchanting young woman. Taking us from the lush mountains of Virginia to the battlefields of France, Children of the Wild reminds us of the best works of Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood.”
—Philipp Meyer, author of American Rust and The Son