Kevin Powers, an Iraq war veteran and author of the acclaimed The Yellow Birds, returns to war as his subject in his fourth novel, this time set during the first world war. Children of the Wild follows two young men from a remote Virginia valley, Roy and Ennis, whose unlikely friendship is forged before the conflict and tested by the violence and moral compromise of the battlefield in France.

The novel traces Roy, the arrogant heir of a wealthy landowner, and Ennis, an orphan raised alone on a mountain, from a love triangle and a fistfight into wartime comradeship after Roy persuades Ennis to enlist alongside him. Powers, who served as a machine-gunner in Iraq between 2003 and 2004, brings unsettling authority to scenes of combat and its aftermath, weaving in war crimes, a pandemic, murders and a flashback to Little Big Horn, though the review notes his characters are less convincingly drawn than his depictions of violence.