Kevin Powers, who served as a machine-gunner in the Iraq war between 2003 and 2004 before turning that experience into his prize-winning debut, has set his fourth novel a century earlier. Children of the Wild moves the action to the first world war, trading the deserts of Mesopotamia for the trenches of France — and the hills of Virginia for the starting point.

Powers's first novel, The Yellow Birds, won the 2012 Guardian first book award. That book drew directly on his time as a soldier in Iraq. His new novel, published in 2026, takes a different war as its spine but keeps its focus on the bond between two young men shaped by violence.

The story follows Roy and Ennis, two young men from a remote valley in Virginia. Roy is the arrogant heir to a wealthy local landowner. Ennis is an orphan of unknown origin who lives in a shack on a mountain. Ennis is drawn off his mountain by his desire for Samantha, the local minister's daughter. Samantha chooses Ennis over Roy, who had expected to marry her. Roy then transfers his affections to Esther, the wealthy and shallow sister of his college roommate Fintan.

Roy and Ennis settle their differences with a punch-up that, instead of deepening the rift, cements an unlikely friendship. Roy joins the army to fight in France as an officer and persuades Ennis to come along as a private. Ennis turns out to have what the novel frames as an Achilles-like genius for warfare.

The Guardian published a review of Children of the Wild on 4 August 2026, describing it as "a gripping tale of a friendship forged in war." The review, titled "Children of the Wild by Kevin Powers review – gripping tale of a friendship forged in war," catalogues a dense plot: violent set pieces on the battlefields of France, war crimes, a pandemic, a quest through the mountains of Ohio, murders, and a flashback to the bloodshed at Little Big Horn (The Guardian).

One line from the novel stands out in the review. A character says: "Every single person on this earth has a hole inside them where someone they loved used to be."

The review is not wholly enthusiastic. It finds the foul-mouthed soldiers and doomed public schoolboys of other war fiction "more lastingly real" than what it calls the "avatars" of Children of the Wild — a suggestion that the novel's characters function more as figures in a mythic structure than as fully rounded people (The Guardian).

For readers who followed Powers from The Yellow Birds, the shift is notable. The author who wrote one of the most discussed literary novels to come out of the Iraq war has now turned to a conflict he did not witness, using Virginia — the landscape he knows — as the launching point for a story that ranges across continents and centuries before landing back on the question of what war does to the people who fight it.