This parallels the greater weight El Akkad devotes to the literary side of his writing over its speculative nature. It is a story born from witnessing political chaos in general a meditative focus on the hatred that war can engender in individuals and the effects that hatred can seed. In truth, American War is not just inspired or relevant to the current US political and social environment. The novel’s timely publication soon after that election bolstered its notice and success, with the horrors of its speculation suddenly a bit too close for comfort. El Akkad began writing his debut novel well before the shock of the last US election hit and its resulting administration began (and continues) to erode our nation’s soul. And so the narrator begins with the brief, nigh unimaginable time when Sarat may actually have known peace and happiness.Īs a novel that combines literary and speculative fiction, American War may be as polarizing for readers as the North/South schisms of this dystopian future, or our current political divisions. They feel the need to begin her story before that tragedy, before the US fell into greater ruin, before the Chestnuts lost their patriarch and the surviving family members became refugees, before Sarat fell down her personal path of despair leading her to monstrosity. This narrator, who is only identified by the close of the novel, explains that they only knew Sarat later in her life, after her innocence was lost and she had played a major role in the South getting its revenge. Omar El Akkad’s American War begins with the narrator introducing us to six-year-old Sarat Chestnut, born amid this national chaos in the remains of Louisiana. With an urge to end the last remnants of resistance as quickly as possible, the North retaliates with equal hate and ferocity.

Fracturing, the South becomes desperate, fueled by hatred. Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi form a core of secession, Texas becomes reabsorbed by Mexico, and South Carolina suffers as ground zero in the release of a plague engineered by the North, leaving the state quarantined.

Yet, the issues are more complex beyond any single cause. While the issue of slavery drove the original Civil War, southern state refusal to accept a federal ban on fossil fuels stokes the fires of the second. Amid these changes, the Second American Civil War breaks out. Climate change has altered the coasts of the United States, wiping out much of Florida and Louisiana. It is approximately half a century in our future.

American war by omar