From the award-winning author of Harbor ('Captivating . . . a virtuoso act of the imagination' - The New York Times Book Review), a major new novel about the human costs of power.

Moving from a cockpit over Afghanistan to a newsroom in the American capital, from an Iranian cemetery to a military intelligence office in suburban Washington, The Room and the Chair explores a world of entwined conflicts, and how narratives about violence are told, twisted, hidden, or forgotten.

Here is a fine-drawn, empathetic portrait of the often overlooked actors of America's infinite global war: the ridiculed night editor of a prestigious newspaper; an overburdened nuclear engineer; a female fighter pilot; a religiously impassioned novice reporter; a sergeant major thrust into the follies and responsibilities of a secretive command. Their longings and loyalties take us from forested city parks where child whores set up business, to a Dubai hotel where a desperate man tries to disappear, to the nighttime corridors of Walter Reed Hospital and the snow-thickened mountains of the Hindu Kush.

Bending the conventions of literary suspense to create a novel as intimate as it is muscular, The Room and the Chair is a groundbreaking chronicle of today's dangerous world.