America Fantastica is Tim O’Brien’s only novel to take place in a post-9/11 world.

Sent off to war by his hometown draft board in 1969, the young O’Brien solidified his literary celebrity within the decade, establishing himself in short order as the most influential Vietnam War writer in the United States. He maintained this posture for the remainder of the century, with a string of widely read and critically acclaimed books that nearly all professed his abiding shame at having participated, even involuntarily, in something as unforgivable as an American war.

But then, right around the turn of the century, he stopped writing fiction. He seemed to abandon his vocation as a novelist at precisely the moment my generation’s war began. America Fantastica therefore marks a return to form. As all the promotional materials make sure to mention, it is O’Brien’s first novel in over twenty years.