When Your Book Meets Realtime

The beauty of fiction is it gives the writer an opportunity to write about multiple events over the course of a single story that ties them all together even it they didn’t happen all at once or to the same people.

The less than smooth exit from Afghanistan brought the realities of U.S. conflicts to the fore of the American public, or at least the media. But for me, I’d been thinking of it for some time particularly because many of the events depicted in the new Monk book,In the Service of Others, take place in Afghanistan.

The story is about what happened to Monk’s youngest brother, Jacob, while on tour in Afghanistan. Jacob is a Marine, and the consequences of what happened, not only to Jacob and his fellow Marines, but to Monk’s family, particularly Moses, Monk’s father, and the families of the other Marines, are the…