Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Book for December 2016
Group 3

was first published in 2012.

19 year old Specialist Billy Lynn is part of an eight-man unit called the Bravo Squad, fighting in Iraq. After a brief but intense fight anointed as "the Battle of Al-Ansakar Canal" was filmed by an embedded Fox News crew, Lynn and the other surviving members return to the U.S. hailed as war heroes and Lynn is awarded the Silver Star. They are sent on a two-week nationwide "Victory Tour" by the Bush administration to invoke support for the war. The culmination is Bravo Squad's invitation to attend the Dallas Cowboys' Thanksgiving game as the football team's guests and to make an appearance during the halftime show with pop idol Beyoncé. On their tour the soldiers have been accompanied by a Hollywood producer who is trying to sell the rights to their story to a movie studio. While the dream of rich rewards is getting ever more elusive Bravo Squad face their imminent return to Iraq.

A film adaptation of the novel directed by Ang Lee is scheduled for release in November 2016.

About the Author
Ben Fountain

(born 1958, Chapel Hill, North Carolina) is an American fiction writer currently living in Dallas, Texas. He has won a number of awards including a PEN/Hemingway award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2007) and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for his debut novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012).