A masterwork by the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, in which the consequences of an illicit love affair reverberate from the heyday of the British empire to the aftermath of African independence Early one morning in 1899, an Englishman named Martin Pearce stumbles out of the desert into an East African coastal town and collapses at the feet of Hassanali, a local shopkeeper. When Hassanali’s sister, the beautiful and disillusioned Rehana, nurses Pearce back to health, a love affair sparks, with consequences that will ripple decades into the future, when another clandestine affair bursts into flame, with equally unforeseen and dramatic consequences. In this devastating and ingeniously spun tale, the Nobelist Abdulrazak Gurnah brilliantly dramatizes the personal and political legacies of colonialism.

Theodore McLauchlin's Desertion examines the personal and political factors behind soldiers' choices to stay in their unit or abandon their cause. He explores what might spur widespread desertion in a given group, how some armed groups manage to keep their soldiers fighting over long periods, and how committed soldiers are to their causes and their comrades. To answer these questions, McLauchlin focuses on combatants in military units during the Spanish Civil War. He pushes against the preconception that individual soldiers' motivations are either personal or political, either selfish or ideological. Instead, he draws together the personal and the political, showing how soldiers come to trust each other—or not. Desertion demonstrates how the armed groups that hold together and survive are those that foster interpersonal connections, allowing soldiers the opportunity to prove their commitment to the fight. McLauchlin argues that trust keeps soldiers in the fray, mistrust pushes them to leave, and political beliefs and military practices shape both. Desertion brings the reader into the world of soldiers and rigorously tests the factors underlying desertion. It asks, honestly and without judgment, what would you do in an army in a civil war? Would you stand and fight? Would you try to run away? And what if you found yourself fighting for a cause you no longer believe in or never did in the first place?

Honor. Courage. Commitment. Three things Jesse Carter has lost. A former Marine, Jesse used to stand proud of his achievements and live by the code. But when circumstance made him question everything he believed in, those most basic values didn't feel so important after all. Sex. Lies. Knights Rebels. Three things Jesse Carter has found. Reborn into a brotherhood not so different from the one he left behind, Jesse finds it all too easy to block out his past and claim the role as Rebels' fun-loving player. Until he meets Bell. Shy, awkward, and with troubles of her own, Bell Johnson's no stranger to hiding her pain. When Jesse forces himself into her life, she's at risk of her defences crumbling. Does Bell have the strength to survive Jesse and his demons or is she fated to become another casualty in the self-destruction of Jesse Carter

Artists and writers consider a tactical desertion from the "culture wars"--a refusal to be distracted, an embrace of the emancipatory understanding of culture. Deserting from the Culture Wars reflects upon and intervenes in our current moment of ever-more polarizing ideological combat, often seen as the return of the "culture wars." How are these culture wars defined and waged? Engaging in a theater of war that has been delineated by the enemy is a shortcut to defeat. Getting out of the reactive mode that produces little but a series of Pavlovian responses, this book proposes a tactical desertion from the culture wars as they are being waged today--a refusal to play the other side's war games, an unwillingness to be distracted.

“Powerful and often startling…The Deserters offers a provokingly fresh angle on this most studied of conflicts.” --The Boston Globe A groundbreaking history of ordinary soldiers struggling on the front lines, The Deserters offers a completely new perspective on the Second World War. Charles Glass—renowned journalist and author of the critically acclaimed Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation—delves deep into army archives, personal diaries, court-martial records, and self-published memoirs to produce this dramatic and heartbreaking portrait of men overlooked by their commanders and ignored by history. Surveying the 150,000 American and British soldiers known to have deserted in the European Theater, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II tells the life stories of three soldiers who abandoned their posts in France, Italy, and Africa. Their deeds form the backbone of Glass’s arresting portrait of soldiers pushed to the breaking point, a sweeping reexamination of the conditions for ordinary soldiers. With the grace and pace of a novel, The Deserters moves beyond the false extremes of courage and cowardice to reveal the true experience of the frontline soldier. Glass shares the story of men like Private Alfred Whitehead, a Tennessee farm boy who earned Silver and Bronze Stars for bravery in Normandy—yet became a gangster in liberated Paris, robbing Allied supply depots along with ordinary citizens. Here also is the story of British men like Private John Bain, who deserted three times but never fled from combat—and who endured battles in North Africa and northern France before German machine guns cut his legs from under him. The heart of The Deserters resides with men like Private Steve Weiss, an idealistic teenage volunteer from Brooklyn who forced his father—a disillusioned First World War veteran—to sign his enlistment papers because he was not yet eighteen. On the Anzio beachhead and in the Ardennes forest, as an infantryman with the 36th Division and as an accidental partisan in the French Resistance, Weiss lost his illusions about the nobility of conflict and the infallibility of American commanders. Far from the bright picture found in propaganda and nostalgia, the Second World War was a grim and brutal affair, a long and lonely effort that has never been fully reported—to the detriment of those who served and the danger of those nurtured on false tales today. Revealing the true costs of conflict on those forced to fight, The Deserters is an elegant and unforgettable story of ordinary men desperately struggling in extraordinary times.

First published in 1646, Spiritual Desertion offers comfort and consolation to believers whose circumstances cause them to wonder if God has abandoned them. Reformation leaders Gisbertus Voetius and Johannes Hoornbeeck demonstrate that the anxiety of doubting believers is proof that God has not abandoned them; rather, it is evidence of the work of the Spirit in their hearts.