Life During Wartime

Post-9/11 America is an uneasy place where soldiers and civilians try to find their way through a fallen world of personal trauma and social disconnection.

Twenty-one-year-old Nina Wicklow, untethered after a tour of duty in Iraq, has gone missing outside Los Angeles in the small mountain town of Sierra Madre. An ad hoc search party of damaged family and friends assembles to look for her.

The anxious pursuit to find the missing soldier, before she comes to harm, plays out against a backdrop of global financial near-collapse and raging wild fires, and becomes, for the walking wounded, a quest for meaning and a way to live during wartime.

Advance praise for Life During Wartime:

Katie Rogin’s riveting debut, Life During Wartime, is a smoking, sun-drenched portrait of a nation at war with itself. Set during the 2008 financial crisis, Rogin’s story of the desperate search for a missing combat veteran explodes into a searing social commentary that resembles, in scope and ambition, Robert Stone’s Vietnam-era work. It’s a powerful, wrenching, thoroughly necessary book.

-- Whitney Terrell, author of The Good Lieutenant

Life During Wartime is a novel of enormous breadth and humanity. Rogin writes with a cool grace, of a world that is as limitless as it is pitiless, and her characters, individual masterpieces, seduce readers with nihilistic allure.

-- John Reed, author of Snowball’s Chance and Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems

Life During Wartime is a meditation, a mystery, a road trip, and a quest for understanding. It’s also a very compelling examination of how trauma—for better or worse—becomes the lens through which we view post-trauma. Katie Rogin has given us a bruised beacon of light in a time of darkness.

-- Patrick Ryan, author of The Dream Life of Astronauts and Send Me