One Soldier

The instant national bestseller. Dillon Hillier, a corporal with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, returned home from a tour in Afghanistan and started up a normal life. But when ISIS insurgents began attacking local populations in Iraq and elsewhere, Hillier, a long-time soldier, felt he had to join in the action, so he sold his truck, lied to his parents about where he was going and became the first Canadian to volunteer to fight ISIS in Iraq For three months, Dillon accompanied the Kurdish army as they fought a series of battles against the Islamic State throughout northern Iraq. During his mission, Dillon saw combat, experienced life in the trenches, partnered with a former US Marine, had a bounty placed on his head and learned an important truth: that in the chaos of war, the difference between life and death is measured in inches, and some things can never be forgotten. First Volunteer is about Hillier’s three months fighting with the Kurds in Iraq, on the front lines. The only reason Dillon’s tour wasn’t longer was because the government wanted him back home, safe and sound.

In the summer of 2008, General Rick Hillier retired as Chief of the Defence staff of the Canadian Forces. You could almost hear the sigh of relief in Ottawa as Canada’s most popular, and most controversial, military leader since the Second World War left a role in which he’d been as frank, unpredictable and resolutely apolitical as any of his predecessors. Born and raised in Newfoundland, Hillier joined the military as a young man and quickly climbed the ranks. He played a significant role in such domestic challenges as the ice storm that paralyzed much of eastern Ontario and Quebec in 1998, and quickly became a player on the international scene, commanding an American corps in Texas and a multinational NATO task force in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But it was his role as General Rick Hillier, Canada’s Chief of the Defence staff, that defined him as a Canadian icon. In Afghanistan, Canada faced its first combat losses since the Korean War, with every casualty becoming front page news. A country formerly ambivalent, or even angry, about its role in the conflict suddenly became gripped by the drama unfolding not only in a war zone halfway around the world but in unfriendly conference rooms in Ottawa. There, as everywhere, Hillier pulled no punches, demanding more funding, more troops and more appreciation for the women and men fighting a war on foreign soil. This hard-hitting, honest account of Hillier’s role—told in his own words—will be one of the most important books published in Canada this decade.

At the Millers Kill Community Center, five veterans gather to work on adjusting to life after war. Reverend Clare Fergusson has returned from Iraq with a head full of bad memories she's using alcohol to wipe out. Dr. George Stillman is denying that the head wound he received has left him with something worse than simple migraines. Officer Eric McCrea is battling to keep his constant rage from affecting his life as a cop, and as a father. High school track star Will Ellis is looking for some reason to keep on living after losing both legs to an IED. And down-on-her-luck Tally McNabb has brought home a secret - a fatal one. Police Chief Russ Van Alstyne just wants Clare to settle down and get married - to him. But when he rules Tally McNabb's death a suicide, Clare sides with the other vets against him. Russ and Clare's unorthodox investigation will uncover a trail of deceit that runs from their tiny Adirondack town to the upper ranks of the Army, and from the waters of the Millers Kill to the unforgiving streets of Baghdad.

This story details the fateful adventures of two Canadian army regiments dispatched to the Pacific to face the Japanese.

A young Russian soldier offers a harrowing chronicle of his experiences in the Chechen wars that captures the fear, chaos, hardship, drudgery, and brutality of modern warfare, documenting his personal odyssey from naïve, teenage conscript to battle-hardened soldier.

A visceral and unflinching memoir of a young Russian soldier’s experience in the Chechen wars. In 1995, Arkady Babchenko was an eighteen-year-old law student in Moscow when he was drafted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya. It was the beginning of a torturous journey from naïve conscript to hardened soldier that took Babchenko from the front lines of the first Chechen War in 1995 to the second in 1999. He fought in major cities and tiny hamlets, from the bombed-out streets of Grozny to anonymous mountain villages. Babchenko takes the raw and mundane realities of war the constant cold, hunger, exhaustion, filth, and terror and twists it into compelling, haunting, and eerily elegant prose. Acclaimed by reviewers around the world, this is a devastating first-person account of war that brilliantly captures the fear, drudgery, chaos, and brutality of modern combat. An excerpt of One Soldier’s War was hailed by Tibor Fisher in The Guardian as “right up there with Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Michael Herr’s Dispatches.” Mark Bowden, bestselling author of Black Hawk Down, hailed it as “hypnotic and terrifying” and the book won Russia’s inaugural Debut Prize, which recognizes authors who write despite, not because of, their life circumstances. “If you haven’t yet learned that war is hell, this memoir by a young Russian recruit in his country’s battle with the breakaway republic of Chechnya, should easily convince you.” —Publishers Weekly

A rediscovered Italian masterpiece chronicling the author's experience as an infantryman, newly translated and reissued to commemorate the centennial of World War I. Taking its place alongside works by Ernst JŸnger, Robert Graves, and Erich Maria Remarque, Emilio Lussu's memoir is one of the most affecting accounts to come out of the First World War. A classic in Italy but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, it reveals, in spare and detached prose, the almost farcical side of the war as seen by a Sardinian officer fighting the Austrian army on the Asiago plateau in northeastern Italy, the alpine front so poignantly evoked by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. For Lussu, June 1916 to July 1917 was a year of continuous assaults on impregnable trenches, absurd missions concocted by commanders full of patriotic rhetoric and vanity but lacking in tactical skill, and episodes often tragic and sometimes grotesque, where the incompetence of his own side was as dangerous as the attacks waged by the enemy. A rare firsthand account of the Italian front, Lussu's memoir succeeds in staging a fierce indictment of the futility of war in a dry, often ironic style that sets his tale wholly apart from the Western Front of Remarque and adds an astonishingly modern voice to the literature of the Great War.