Redeployment

Across twelve stories, Phil Klay follows soldiers and veterans of the Iraq War. In the title story, a soldier who had to shoot dogs feeding on corpses comes back to suburban life among people with no idea where Fallujah is. Other narrators include a lance corporal seeking to atone for a killing he did not commit, a mortuary affairs Marine collecting American and Iraqi remains, a chaplain whose faith is tested by a ferocious colonel, and a Foreign Service officer told to help Iraqis by teaching them baseball. Klay, who served in the Marine Corps and was deployed to Anbar Province, spent four years on the collection, which took the National Book Award for Fiction in 2014.

A roundup of Barack Obama's reading lists it among the fiction he has been linked to over the years.