Subtitle: A Novel of the Vietnam War

Amazon Best Books of the Year
New York Times Bestseller
AudioFile Best Book of the Year
AudioFile Best Voice
Audible’s Audiobook of the Year
AudioFile Earphones Award
Barnes & Noble Summer Discover Pick
Amazon Best Book of the Month

     In the monsoon season of 1968-69 at a fire support base called Matterhorn, located in the remote mountains of Vietnam, a young and ambitious Marine lieutenant wants to command a company to further his civilian political ambitions.
     Two people stand in his way.
     The first is a well-loved, combat-weary lieutenant of his own age who desperately wants out of the bush, but who does not want to leave his Marines with an inexperienced and overly ambitious officer.
     The second is an angry leader of the company’s radical blacks, who has all the political skill, savvy, and ambition of the protagonist.As the young lieutenant experiences the costs of combat, he sees the terrible results of his actions and begins to question the value of ambition and skill over compassion and heart.
     Dan Rather, award-winning TV news anchor: "Matterhorn is one of the most powerful and moving novels about combat, the Vietnam War, and war in general that I have ever read."
     New York Times: "Marlantes pushes you through what may be one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam — or any war. It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered...
     "Matterhorn is a raw, brilliant account of war that may well serve as a final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history."
     AudioFile: "Narrator Bronson Pinchot should get a medal for his extraordinary portrayal of Lieutenant Waino Mellas in Marlantes’ debut novel. The author, a former Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran, tells a heartrending, nerve-jangling story of war. Pinchot breathes life into each member of Mellas’s Bravo Company as they inch their way up a strategic mountain in the middle of the Vietnam War.
     "Pinchot allows a tinge of regret to creep into his voice as the men are sprayed with ‘harmless’ Agent Orange and face one seemingly exhausting task after another. A surprise attack by a wily jungle cat heightens the eeriness of the tension-filled environment, a quality that is perfectly matched by Pinchot’s performance."
     Michael Schaub, NPR Book Reviewer: "I’ve laughed at Catch-22 and wept at The Thin Red Line, but I’ve never encountered a war novel as stark, honest and wrenching as Matterhorn.
     "Marlantes writes with a spare clarity, but he’s unafraid to plumb the emotions of the young men in Bravo Company; the icy bravado of Hemingway or Mailer has no place in these pages.
     "The Marines of Matterhorn are both brave and frightened, both committed and resigned. Their common refrain, ‘There it is,’ denotes acceptance of some new and unfortunate but unchangeable fact.
     "By turns, this book horrified me, crushed me and beat me up, but I found it nearly impossible to stop reading. More than any living American novelist I’ve read, Marlantes made me feel what I already must have known: that war is worse than hell. There it is!"
     BookPage: "Matterhorn will not only take its place on the top shelf of war fiction, it’s going to knock a few books off. It’s that good."
     Publishers Weekly (starred review): "Marlantes’ epic debut is a dense, vivid narrative...
     "A decorated Vietnam veteran, the author clearly understands his playing field, and by examining both the internal and external struggles of the battalion, he brings a long, torturous war back to life with realistic characters and authentic, thrilling combat sequences...
     "A grand, accomplishment."
     USA Today: "A brutally vivid debut novel...The visceral Matterhorn is as much a tribute to the Marine culture of bravery as it is a dissection of a contentious war and a meditation on the American civil rights movement...
     "Marlantes’ writing is evocative. We feel the Marines’ exhaustion as they dig gun pits, carry dead and wounded comrades, and nearly die from hunger... pitches us into a harrowing narrative we won’t soon forget.
     "Even as the Vietnam War recedes into the past, the despair, confusion, and mythology it generated retains a grip on our culture.
     "Debut novelist Marlantes offers a realistic, in-the-trenches look at that war...The battle scenes, at which the author excels, are frequent, brutal, and viscerally energetic, and the skillfully rendered dialog reveals a bunch of strangers attempting to communicate in life-defeating circumstances.
     "In the end, there are no real victors...this is a major work that will be a valuable addition to any permanent collection."
     Booklist: "The Vietnam novel has come of age, and this is a worthy addition to the genre...
      "The environment is painted in vivid, intense hues: the fog malevolent, the bugs and leeches constant torturers, and jungle rot universal. The enemy is always near and often unseen until firefights explode with shocking savagery...the characters are, if traditional, certainly believable. This tough, unsentimental saga is filled with frightened men; most endure and achieve a certain nobility in spite of themselves.
    "An engrossing chronicle of men at war."
     Amazon.com: "Matterhorn is a marvel -- a living, breathing book with Lieutenant Waino Mellas and the men of Bravo Company at its raw and battered heart.
     "Karl Marlantes doesn’t introduce you to Vietnam in his brilliant war epic -- he unceremoniously drops you into the jungle, disoriented and dripping with leeches, with only the newbie lieutenant as your guide...Readers gain a new perspective on the ravages of war, the politics and bureaucracy of the military, and the peculiar beauty of brotherhood.
     "There has never been a more realistic portrait or eloquent tribute to the nobility of men under fire, and never a more damning portrait of a war that ground them cruelly underfoot for no good reason...There are passages in this book that are as good as anything I have ever read...
     "Vladimir Nabokov once said that the greatest books are those you read not just with your heart or your mind, but with your spine. This is one for the spine."

     A Cum-Laude graduate of Yale University and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, was a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals.
     He has lived and traveled all over the world and now writes full time.     He and his wife, Anne, have five children and live on a small lake in Washington state.
     Author’s Comments About the Book: "It’s a story about growing up and learning compassion in a very difficult situation. I tried to be as true to the experience of what it’s like to be 19 or 20 years old in combat.
     "The generation that did live through the Vietnam era—the Baby Boomers—is now at an age when they’re trying to reflect on things. It was an enormously divisive time in America, the place looked like it was going up in smoke. Now we’re reflecting on that."
     Author’s Comments About the Audiobook: "The recent releaseof the audiobook, narrated by actor Bronson Pinchot (Perfect Strangers), only adds to the urgency and intricacies of the story. He did an incredible job.
     "He’s really good at bringing characters. Some speak in ways that I didn’t imagine, often making me think,: Oh, that’s interesting!’"

     An Audie® Award winning Narrator.
     Received his education at Yale University, which filled out what he had already received at his mother’s knee in the all-important areas of Shakespeare, Greek art and architecture, and the Italian Renaissance.
     He restores Greek Revival buildings and appears in television, film, and on stage whenever the pilasters and entablatures overwhelm him.