Children of the Wild

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.
'I inhaled this heart-wrenching epic...a breathtaking story of three young people coming together and coming of age' Rachel Beanland
'A novel of extraordinary beauty and power' Ben Fountain
Ewer's Rock, Virginia, 1917. Roy Young is restless, determined to leave this rural valley and make his mark on the twentieth century. Samantha Hatton, the minister's daughter, knows the town expects her and Roy to marry, but she hungers for more. The arrival of Ennis Duke - a mysterious wild boy tending to a lost herd of cattle up the mountain - will change everything.
Within a year, the lives of these three young people will be dramatically transformed. In the crucible of conflict, Roy and Ennis 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, 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, honour, 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.

Kevin Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and a recipient of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Guardian First Book Award, the Prix Littéraire du Monde Prix Étranger, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine, among other prizes, and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He was a James A. Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas at Austin from 2009-2012 and has held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. A US Army veteran of the Iraq war, he lives on Florida's First Coast with his family.