Missionaries

One of President Obama's Favorite Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book |One of the Wall Street Journal Ten Best Books of the Year

**"Missionaries is a courageous book: It doesn t shy away, as so much fiction does, from the real world. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, *The New York Times Book Review

• A sweeping, interconnected novel of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer . . . By taking a long view of the rational insanity of global warfare, Missionaries brilliantly fills one of the largest gaps in contemporary literature. The Wall Street Journal

  The debut novel from the National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment
  *
  A group of Colombian soldiers prepares to raid a drug lord's safe house on the Venezuelan border. They're watching him with an American-made drone, about to strike using military tactics taught to them by U.S. soldiers who honed their skills to lethal perfection in Iraq. In Missionaries*, Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives.

  For Mason, a U.S. Army Special Forces medic, and Lisette, a foreign correspondent, America's long post-9/11 wars in the Middle East exerted a terrible draw that neither is able to shake. Where can such a person go next? All roads lead to Colombia, where the US has partnered with local government to keep predatory narco gangs at bay. Mason, now a liaison to the Colombian military, is ready for the good war, and Lisette is more than ready to cover it. Juan Pablo, a Colombian officer, must juggle managing the Americans' presence and navigating a viper's nest of factions bidding for power. Meanwhile, Abel, a lieutenant in a local militia, has lost almost everything in the seemingly endless carnage of his home province, where the lines between drug cartels, militias, and the state are semi-permeable.

  Drawing on six years of research in America and Colombia into the effects of the modern way of war on regular people, Klay has written a novel of extraordinary suspense infused with geopolitical sophistication and storytelling instincts that are second to none. Missionaries is a window not only into modern war, but into the individual lives that go on long after the drones have left the skies.

  “Missionaries is a courageous book: It doesn’t shy away, as so much fiction does, from the real world . . . Is there such a thing as a ‘good war,’ like the one Mason seeks? Missionaries is skeptical at best; it does believe, however, in fiction’s ability to illuminate these dark places. And so the novel goes on, undeterred, exploring and revealing whole human worlds that would remain inaccessible without it.” —Juan Gabriel Vásquez, The New York Times Book Review

  “A sweeping, interconnected novel of ideas in the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Norman Mailer . . . By taking a long view of the ‘rational insanity’ of global warfare, Missionaries brilliantly fills one of the largest gaps in contemporary literature.” *—The Wall Street Journal

  “[This] compact epic of a novel contains perhaps Klay's finest writing yet . . . Using his formidable gifts for scene-setting, meaningful irony and deep human empathy, Klay weaves together a set of stories over the course of nearly three decades . . . Amid raging fires and illness and constitutional crises, Klay's book roars something vital: Never forget about war or the blood and bone and the evil and the reckless idealism of who we all really are." **—Los Angeles Times
  
  *“[This] astounding novel . . . does not shy away from the thorny moral questions and psychological impacts of conflict, and the result is at once terrifying and thought-provoking.” *—The New York Times*

  “This is a gray universe where it’s difficult to distinguish the good guys and gals from the bad, and it rings true to those of us who have spent time in these places. . . . will stick with you.” **—NPR, Best Books of 2020

  “Wrenching and insightful.” —The New Yorker
  **
  “Klay’s considerable accomplishment in Missionaries, goes well beyond incisive ‘insider access into the next permutation of the massive, industrial-scale U.S. machine for generating and executing targets.’ In the tradition of Robert Stone and Graham Greene, he makes geopolitical misadventure, cultural blindness and atavistic behavior pulse inevitably toward terrible denouement.” —Associated Press
   
  “Frequently gripping and powerfully written.” —The Washington Post
  
  “Thorough, forceful, and ambitious . . . Missionaries is a deeply ethical novel, and one that often pauses to question the purpose of war and possibility of redemption for combatants of all kinds. It is also a very well-built narrative . . . Klay is able to write kidnapping and murder without sensationalism; he never loses track of his moral questions, even while toggling between interiority and thriller-paced action. He maintains clarity through a sequence of events so intricate and scenes so populous that the vast majority of writers — great ones included: John Le Carré is often guilty of this — would forfeit the reader's understanding. Most importantly, Klay tends well to his many characters, giving each not only a voice, but a resolution . . .  by the end, its humanity, like its purpose, is clear.” —NPR.org
   
  “Klay saw something new and terrifying in modern war, and his first novel brings something new and fearsome to modern war literature. Klay’s confident vision and disciplined command of a complex structure makes Missionaries a powerful, meaningful, and original addition to war lit’s crowded catalog . . . Missionaries is new and vital because it transcends the inward-facing, American-oriented ennui that modern war literature too often relies on.” —Daily Beast

  “Klay . . . shares with Joseph Conrad, an obvious lodestar, a command of the complexity and precariousness of an interconnected global order. He shares with Greene an awareness that global phenomena are inseparable from human beings, like Mason, who frets endlessly about being a "shitty father" and absent husband, or Pablo, with his well-founded anxieties about how his young daughter perceives his brutal work. There are souls at stake here. The terrible arc of Abel's life, in particular, is as haunting as Lord Jim or The Power and the Glory as a portrait of disgrace in pursuit of redemption . . . Missionaries is galvanic and affecting, its prose shifting from beautiful and graceful to hard-boiled as hell; above all, it bears the unmistakable stamp of having been written by someone who didn't need a research assistant to get the bloody details right. That this hard-won knowledge is made to serve such superb, morally serious storytelling is reassuring. The bodies may pile up in Missionaries, but at least we have our proof that the novel is far from dead.” —Washington Examiner

  “Brutal, subtle, and witheringly savvy, Phil Klay’s first novel, Missionaries, casts a scathing light on American military ventures overseas, while also immersing readers in the tumult of Colombia as it struggled toward peace and democracy in the first decades of the 21st century . . . Klay, through archival and on-the-ground research, delivers what feels remarkably like a genuine South American novel built from lived experience of his numerous Colombian characters.” —Boston Globe

  “Building on exhaustive research and a seemingly endless capacity to develop rich, psychol…