Longlisted for the Center for Fiction'sFirst Novel Prize
“Long after the combatants and non-combatants alike have vanished from this earth, the afterlife of war is a book, war’s only survivor, and every true book about war cries out, Stop, or at least, Remember. I’d Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them, Jesse Goolsby’s ambitious, multi-layered, brutally honest debut novel, is such a book, an antidote to our nation’s disconnect from our misadventures overseas.”
“I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them offers a heartbreaking and humane lens into the lives of those connected to war, refusing to avert its gaze when confronted with even the most gut-wrenching situations. Jesse Goolsby recognizes that the battlefield stretches far beyond the demarcations of a combat zone, or the borders of Afghanistan. That said, this is not strictly a book about war—this is a book about the human heart. This is the news, rarely told, of the actual world we live in.”