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“The beautiful, violent and almost perfect new novel by Phil Klay.” (LA Times)
Wall Street Journal Ten Best Books of 2020
New York Times Notable Book of 2020
Selected by Barack Obama as one of the best books of 2020
In the modern world, everything is connected, including how we kill.
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 his debut novel Missionaries, National Book Award-winning author and Iraq War veteran Phil Klay examines the globalization of violence through the interlocking stories of four characters and the conflicts that define their lives.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR MISSIONARIES:
“Klay’s understanding of Colombia, the main theater of war in Missionaries, is the chief source of admiration for this reviewer. There are no simple wars, of course, but the Colombian conflict is as intricate as they come. . . 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] 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. We send men (and women) out to fight. For what? And what happens to them when they return? . . . Well worth the wait, “Missionaries” is (among its many virtues) a prime example of what can ideally follow a first great war book. Intricate and ambitious, it’s a rich network of converging stories in which the plot itself becomes the destiny of its characters. And the ceaseless engine driving it forward is American foreign policy, oriented as it always is toward the previous war . . . “Missionaries” is horrifying and refreshing, challenging us to reflect not just on the destruction of our own national institutions but also on the ugly and ongoing consequences of American power abroad.” —Los Angeles Times
“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
Wrenching and insightful.” —The New Yorker
“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
“[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…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, psychologically complex characters, Klay captures the wretchedness of neglected Colombian villages brutalized by competing murderers . . . There is an unblinking forcefulness in Klay’s accounts of psychotic punishments whimsically inflicted on innocent people by renegade militia and the sometimes meaningless results of official tactical missions.”—Seattle Times
“Klay is brilliant on things like what it’s like to walk through a city after a recent bombing. He is very fine on what he calls the soundtrack of war: ‘the rasp of the Velcro on magazine pouches opening, the crunch of dried mud yielding to the massive tires of heavy armored vehicles, the cough of a diesel engine, the roar of a passing Chinook, the excited shouts from a nearby soccer field, the chirping of birds.’ He understands both the technology of war and the wet stuff of brutality and torture. He’s dryly funny about the new realities of American journalism and foreign reporting, where online ‘there’s no page A26 to flip past, because people don’t accidentally get reported facts on the way to the opinion page anymore.’”—New York Times
“With Missionaries Klay, winner of the National Book Award in 2014, has dropped a novel on us of a muscular veracity as terrifying and important as it is rare in contemporary writing.”—The Millions
“[Klay] creates ambiguity not through atmospheric language or irony (Redeployment had its share of Heller-esque gallows humor) but through careful psychological portraits that reveal how readily relationships grow complicated and how even good intentions come undone in the face of humanity’s urge to violence . . . An unflinching and engrossing exploration of violence’s agonizing persistence.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"If Redeployment was about what happened when we ship wars abroad, then Missionaries is what happens when war comes roaring right back. Expansive, explosive, and epic." —Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
"Phil Klay's work has the large canvas, bitter clarity, and wild
imagination of the great Robert Stone. With Missionaries he more than
fulfills the immense promise of Redeployment."—George Packer, author of The Unwinding and Our Man
"This engaging and far-ranging novel is about the thorny battle for reconciliation in the midst of an endlessly-fought war. For all the tense geopolitics and violent special forces raids and guerilla warfare in Missionaries, Phil Klay’s true subject is the contested territory of the heart. It is here, in the novel’s poignant exploration of faith and parental love and uneasy moral compromises, that the cost of US military intervention is laid bare. A moving, chilling, and accomplished novel." —Kirstin Valdez Quade, author of Night at the Fiestas: Stories
“What happens when a novel becomes more than a novel? It becomes a prophecy. Phil Klay has written a prophecy.” —Elliot Ackerman, National Book Award finalist and author of Red Dress in Black and White
"Shook me to my core. Klay takes the reader into the heart of Colombian darkness; the abuses of power, the forgotten lives of girls and women and how quickly human dignity – and conscience – get eroded in extreme times. This is audacious, heartbreaking, epic fiction." —Mary Costello, author of The River Capture
“Phil Klay's Missionaries is a big, rich, clear-eyed book about death and life; wise, compassionate, and yes, as cynical as it needs to be when necessary, but full of vivid people caught up in that organized human violence which is our species' haunting passion. I've maybe never read a war novel this good.” —Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Disgraced
“Missionaries is an urgent, detailed, compassionate and quietly furious novel about America and her Forever Wars. Intensely readable, exciting, funny and heartbreaking—it will change you.” —A.L. Kennedy, author of The Little Snake
“Phil Klay’s Missionaries has a sweep and incisiveness to it I had almost forgotten novels were capable of. I haven't been so gripped by a book in years. It is immensely smart & far-seeing, & utterly unsparing. Extraordinary.” —Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness