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Omar el akkad books6/4/2023 A handful of southern states, refusing to abide by federal laws prohibiting the use of fossil fuels, have attempted to secede from the union, setting off a second civil war. Its heroine, Sarat Chestnutt, grows up in a shack by the Mississippi, in a Louisiana eaten away by the rising Gulf of Mexico. Set in the late 21st century, the novel imagines an America wrecked by war and the flooding brought on by climate change. The mission of Omar El Akkad’s first novel, American War, is admirable: to encourage western readers, especially Americans, to put themselves in the shoes of the world’s radicalised displaced people. The uniforms fit badly and it keeps flunking basic training. Other value systems, religious or political, might insist that art serve a theological or ideological cause, but the novel – in its origins a bourgeois enterprise – makes a poor missionary or soldier. This is one reason humanism regards art as sacred: it exists for its own sake. A novel, like a person, doesn’t have to have a purpose.
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