The First Stone, Carsten Jensen
The First Stone, Carsten Jensen
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

The First Stone

Author: Carsten Jensen, Mark Mussari

Narrator: Ray Chase

Unabridged: 15 hr 58 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download (DRM Protected)

Published: 09/01/2019

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of We, the Drowned comes a brutal, unflinching, and bestselling epic novel of a platoon of soldiers descending into the insanity of the war in Afghanistan.Dispatched to fight the Taliban as part of the NATO forces, the soldiers of the Third Platoon arrive in a desert hell intent on testing their courage and endurance.Among them are the charismatic platoon leader Schrøder, a former games designer fascinated by the imaginative potential of war; Colonel Steffensen, whose negotiating tactics will have deadly consequences; Sidekick, the LifeLogger whose online “war memorial” will blur into horror; and the hardened but vulnerable Hannah, who must bury her womanhood—or sacrifice her soul.Confronted by a betrayal that no military training could prepare them for, the soldiers must embark on a desperate mission to track down an enemy whose methods are as murderous as they are unfathomable.As the hunters become the hunted, the mission turns into a depraved, hallucinatory voyage into an Afghanistan they never knew existed. With the Third Platoon’s most fundamental notions of good and evil called into question, survival becomes their only mission.An explicitly brutal portrait of battle told with the propulsion of a harrowing psychological thriller, The First Stone is a stunning and epic depiction of comradeship, humanity, and the bestial realities of a conflict without end.

About Carsten Jensen

A leading literary figure in his native Denmark, Carsten Jensen is the author of the international bestseller We, the Drowned, which has sold more than half a million copies in twenty languages. As well as being an acclaimed novelist, essayist, newspaper columnist, and political commentator, Jensen has reported from war zones in the Balkans and Afghanistan. He has been awarded many prizes for fiction and nonfiction, including Denmark’s coveted Golden Laurel for the travelogue I Have Seen the World Begin, and Sweden’s prestigious Olof Palme Prize for his “work, in words and deed, to defend the weak and vulnerable in his own country as well as around the world.”

Reviews

Goodreads review by Suz on October 24, 2019

Before now, I had not considered myself particularly feminist. This book and this author have now piqued my interest. I picked this book up at the academic library at which I work. The unit of study of which it is included is entitled From Vindication to Liberation: A Comparative History of Feminism......more

Goodreads review by PattyMacDotComma on October 31, 2020

5★ “. . . it’s not the kind of book that’s easy to review briskly. Because it’s a series of shifting speculations, with an open structure, it’s hard to pull out single quotes without distorting it. What the book invites from a reader is openness – an answering spark.” Helen Garner said that in a lectu......more

Goodreads review by David on May 15, 2014

My first reaction to this book was one of disgust. That was in 1995, but I picked it up again recently and decided to give the book another chance. I read the title, the epigraphs, the first chapter. I was still disgusted. I’ve now finished the book, and the disgust stays with me still. As a work of......more

Goodreads review by Nicholas on October 02, 2008

Helen Garner has an out-of-control empathetic ego. She feels she has the right to tell the women's story without having interviewed them because "after all, I am a woman". Ultimately non-one around her is allowed any emotional experience outside of her own. She also naively expects all strangers to......more

Goodreads review by Luke on March 31, 2025

Confounding, messy text. Equal parts bold, infuriating and insightful. Garner is such a clear-minded, transparent thinker that a part of the pleasure of this book is in seeing the moral and ethical questions pondered here be turned about, sorted through and challenged by her intellect. I find myself......more

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