Elliot Ackerman – författare

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning by Elliot Ackerman. In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across the table from Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and has murky connections to the Islamic State. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after he establishes a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he was a Marine. The two men then compare their fighting experiences in the Middle East, discovering they had shadowed each other for some time: a realisation that brings them to a strange kind of intimacy.Elliot Ackerman''s extraordinary memoir explores the events that led him to come to this refugee camp and what, unable to forget his time in battle, he hoped to find there. Moving between his recent time on the ground as a journalist in Syria and his Marine deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of astonishing atmospheric pressure, one which blends the American experience with the perspectives and stories of the Arab world, and draws a line between them.At once an intensely personal book about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of the past two decades of strife for the region and the world, Places and Names bids to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.

'Skwerl, Cheese, Dickhead Mike, the White Russian—these characters are totally addictive. I couldn’t put Sheepdogs down. A thriller and comedy in one, it’s a wild ride' HARLAN COBENA sly, funny, action-packed thriller introducing an instantly iconic spy duo, from the author of New York Times bestseller 2034Skwerl and Cheese are down on their luck. Skwerl, who is resourceful like a squirrel (Marines win battles, not spelling bees), used to work for the CIA’s elite paramilitary wing. He was unceremoniously fired after a raid went bad in Afghanistan. ‘Big Cheese’ Aziz, a legendary pilot – his nation’s Maverick – is equally hard up. So Skwerl recruits Cheese into an anonymous network of so-called sheepdogs, who operate in the shadowy moral grey zone between predator and prey.Their first mission? To repossess a private jet stranded on a remote Ugandan airfield. Their fee: a commission on the jet’s $5 million value. But nothing about the job seems to add up. Their contact goes missing. Their handler is as mysterious as the real source of the money. And when the women in their lives get involved – one pregnant wife and one dominatrix – the stakes skyrocket overnight.From the jungles of Kampala to a glamorous hotel in Marseille, from a veteran-run pizzeria in Kyiv to a Panera in northern Virginia, Skwerl and Cheese must navigate an increasingly tangled set of loyalties where no one and nothing is what it seems. Globe-trotting and page-turning, full of heart and humour, Sheepdogs is a wild ride through the underbelly of modern war and intelligence.

From the National Book Award finalist, a breathtakingly spare and shattering new novel that traces the intersection of three star-crossed lives.

Eden Malcom lies in a bed, unable to move or to speak, imprisoned in his own mind. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his hospital room. He has never even met their young daughter. And he will never again see the friend and fellow soldier who didn't make it back home—and who narrates the novel. But on Christmas, the one day Mary is not at his bedside, Eden's re-ordered consciousness comes flickering alive. As he begins to find a way to communicate, some troubling truths about his marriage—and about his life before he went to war—come to the surface. Is Eden the same man he once was: a husband, a friend, a father-to-be? What makes a life worth living? A piercingly insightful, deeply felt meditation on loyalty and betrayal, love and fear, Waiting for Eden is a tour de force of profound humanity.