In some ways the most fully realized character in this novel is the maimed American South. “I seek out special people,” he tells Sarat, “people who, if given the chance and necessary tools, would stand up and face the enemy on behalf of those who can’t.” Sarat falls for it. In the pestilence of the refugee camp, he is the one scrap of dignity, of freedom. There Sarat, a tomboy and a loner, is approached by a man named Albert Gaines, who visits periodically with envelopes of money for insurrectionist families and leaves before the stink of the ever-overflowing sewage canal begins to cling to his pre-war suit. As fighting edges closer to home, the remaining Chestnut family––Martina, her son, Simon, and her twin girls, Dana and Sarat¬¬––make it to a refugee camp in the Free Southern State. The morning he arrives at the office for his interview, a Southern insurrectionist blows himself and the building up. The war has started, and the mother, Martina, has badgered the father into scrounging up an application for a Northern work permit. They are poor but scrappy, anxious but happy. In the beginning, the Chestnut family lives in a shipping container in southernmost Louisiana. El Akkad is not primarily concerned with the political narrative of this future, though it is collected here in the form of oral histories, Senate-hearing transcripts, and newspaper articles, which provide the historical context for his real focus: the personal narratives of a family deranged and destroyed by the war. Not so in the destitute world of American War.

It’s easy to see such a climate catastrophe as a possibility––or for the more eco-anxious among us, an inevitability––but even in an increasingly factional America, we still hope we’ll come together for peace.

The federal government has relocated to Columbus, Ohio, and in a Hail Mary pass has outlawed fossil fuels. The rest of the world-including the Middle East, which has now united to become the prosperous Bouazizi Empire-moved to solar energy long ago. The climate crisis has accelerated, and the coastline as we know it has disappeared, leaving behind frayed scraps of land where whole cities once stood. The second American Civil War begins in 2074 when an unstable Southern girl blows herself up and kills the president, but its seeds were sown long before that. “Some people are born sentenced to terrible inheritance, diseases that lay dormant in their blood from birth,” reflects the reluctant narrator of Omar El Akkad’s new novel, American War.

American war by omar