and lies marveling at his luck, and thinks of a beautiful prostitute named Marie-Louise, and is distracted by the corpses packed slick hot on all sides of him….”

So, when The Times chose it as one of the best novels of 2025, I chose it too for our book club. The fact that it won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was only an added reason for choosing it. Yes, it was written as one breathless run-on 285-page incomplete sentence, an artistic accomplishment. It had incredible characters, including an actual fallen Angel and a group of American GIs, and portrayed the horrors of trench warfare in WWI in harsh blood-red technicolor.

The book stimulated one of the most robust conversations our group has had. Anti-war, mystical and mythic characters, great humor and pathos.
Order it from the library “or wherever you get your books” and dig in.

~Reviewed by Bernard Aserkoff