"It's 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, all of whom are safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. They receive weekly dispatches from The Preshutian, their school newspaper, informing them of older classmates killed or wounded in action....

"A dazzling literary debut novel-within-a-novel, in the vein of The Prophets, about a young author writing about the forbidden love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl--in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction"-- Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring. A publisher has given him three weeks to rewrite his book, and he must immerse...