A Shout in the Ruins

Kevin Powers' first novel, The Yellow Birds, won the Guardian First Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was a National Book Award Finalist. His poetry collection, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and Forward Prize. His second novel, A Shout in the Ruins, was published in 2018.

Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, he graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the US Army in 2004 and 2005 in Mosul and Tal Afar, Iraq.

"A Shout in the Ruinsis confirmation, if it were needed, that Kevin Powers is a writer of rare talent."—Financial Times
"Much as inThe MarchE.L. Doctorow's epic civil war novel, Mr. Powers gives a strong sense of a vast body of humanity caught up in a tumult that still reverberates today... Above all this troubling, stirring book is informed by Mr. Powers's deep understanding of war's complexities, and of how people are broken and shaped by it."—The Economist
"The characters in Powers' bleak, stunning novel are subject to indignities too countless and cruel to name. Like his debut,The Yellow Birds, it's a searing look at the ravages of war, and how violence can shape a nation in ways that may never be fully recoverable.... It won't surprise anyone who's readThe Yellow Birdsthat Powers is a hell of a writer. His use of language inA Shout in the Ruins- inspired, perhaps, by William Faulkner - is nothing short of brilliant, and he connects with his characters in a very real way; he explores their psyches with an uncommon sensitivity."—Michael Schaub,NPR
"Powers brings to Virginia battle scenes the same searing immediacy he brought to his stories of carnage inThe Yellow Birds."—Ron Charles,Washington Post
"With a complex structure reminiscent of Faulkner, Powers adroitly weaves his narrative threads together with subtle connections that reinforce his themes of longing for coherence and the continuing effect of the past on the present. An impressive novel of slavery, destruction, and the arduous difficulties of love."—Kirkus, Starred Review
"Some passages in Powers' second novel, following his awarding-winning The Yellow Birds (2012), unfold with a fable's tragic inevitability, while specificity of setting and character, both strikingly described and original, will brand them into the reader's consciousness . . . Beautifully formed sentences express unsettling truths about humanity, yet tendrils of hope emerge, showing how love and kindness can take root in seemingly barren earth."—Booklist
"A masterly meditation on our unbreakable connection to a world predicated on cyclical violence."—Library Journal
"Guided by a homing instinct for human truths,A Shout in the Ruinsis a daring voyage into and out of the darkest era in American history"—Observer
"Suitably unvarnished, but not without moments of beauty or deep emotion. A Shout in the Ruins brushes aside myth and romanticism for a clear-eyed look at American heritage."—Shelf Awareness
"A masterpiece. Powers has written a novel that includes all the ferocity, complexity, and racial violence of the American South, from its fall to its eventual rebirth."—Philipp Meyer

"Kevin Powers has seamlessly woven nineteenth and twentieth century lives to create a novel that resonates out of the past to address the most timely issues of America in our own century. The same striking language and contemplation of war and its aftermath that madeThe Yellow Birdssuch a lauded debut is on full display inA Shout in the Ruins. What an impressive novel."—Ron Rash

"A harrowing and lyrical epic in miniature, Powers has written a novel excavated from another time, but which speaks profoundly to this one."
—Elliot Ackerman, author of Dark at the Crossing

Praise forThe Yellow Birds:

"A remarkable first novel...The Yellow Birdsis brilliantly observed and deeply affecting: at once a freshly imagined bildungsroman about a soldier's coming of age, a harrowing story about the friendship of two young men trying to stay alive on the battlefield in Iraq, and a philosophical parable about the loss of innocence and the uses of memory...Extraordinary."—Michiko Kakutani,New York Times
"The Yellow Birdsmight just be the first American literary masterpiece produced by the Iraq war."—Los Angeles Times
"An elegiac, sober, and haunting coming-of-age war story."—TIME
"The first great Iraq War novel."—Darren Reidy,Rolling Stone
"A first novel as compact and powerful as a footlocker full of ammo....Kevin Powers has something to say, something deeply moving about the frailty of man and the brutality of war, and we should all lean closer and listen."—Benjamin Percy,New York Times Book Review
"An exquisite excavation of the war's moral and psychological wreckage. Powers evokes the peculiar smell and feel of the war better than any journalist."—The New Yorker
"Darkly beautiful....How to tell a true war story if you're more a poet than a novelist? Tell it as a poet would. Tell it as Kevin Powers does."—Alan Cheuse, NPR's All Things Considered
"A novel of grit, grace, and blood by an Iraq war veteran....Kevin Powers moves gracefully between spare, factual description of the soldiers' work to simple, hard-won reflections on the meaning of war."—Ron Charles,Washington Post
"An unusually spare and lyrical war story....The characters are sketched with as much heart as economy...Like the Iraq heat, which 'had the surprising effect of reducing one to tears in an instant,'The Yellow Birdsskulks along, detached and undemanding, until all of a sudden you turn a page and find yourself weeping."—GQ