In hundreds of reviews, Craig’s novels have been praised for their strong characters, action, and gritty realism. Each book promises an exciting experience with people you’ll care about in a world that feels real.
These works have been nominated for major literary awards such as the Bram Stoker Award and Audie Award, translated into multiple languages, and optioned for film.
DiLouie applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Our War, and reported the following:
Published by Orbit, Our War is a dystopian thriller about a brother and sister forced to fight as child soldiers on opposite sides of a second American civil war, and the people whose lives they touch: a UNICEF worker, a journalist, and a commander in a local militia.Visit Craig DiLouie's website.
On page 69, Gabrielle, who arrived in a besieged Indianapolis to assess humanitarian needs for the United Nations, visits the Peace Office, a Quaker church dedicated to helping to reunite families separated by the siege lines. Aubrey, a local journalist, has taken her there. Forced to play “fixer”—a local who helps journalists navigate a foreign place while they investigate news stories—for Gabrielle, Aubrey is chafing at being out of the action but hopes the UNICEF operative will lead her to good stories. Eventually, they will discover a horrifying fact: Local militias are using children as porters, cooks, runners, even fighters on the front line. Together, they will try to expose and stop it.
This page is representative of the novel in how it shows that civil war is 98 percent survival and 2 percent fighting. It also shows that a second American civil war would look far more like the Bosnian War in the 1990s than the first American civil war in the 1860s. Civilians would do most of the fighting, and the fighting would be everywhere as “red” rural areas turned against “blue” urban areas. Everybody would fight, nobody would win, and as this visit to the Peace Office shows, the war’s biggest losers would be the innocent.
Writers Read: Craig DiLouie.
--Marshal Zeringue
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