The God of War

The year is 1978. Ares Ramirez, age 12, lives with his mother, Laurel, and his younger brother Malcolm in a trailer at the edge of the Salton Sea, an unintentionally man-made body of water in the middle of the Southern California desert. It is a desolate, forgotten place, whose inhabitants thrive amidst seemingly impossible circumstances.

Where birds fly by day across the desert sky, by night government fighter planes and helicopters make training runs using live ammunition, and an anonymous dead body floats in from the sea. These events inspire Ares, on the cusp of his adolescence, to enact elaborate fantasies of mortal combat. His membership in a troubled family marks Ares as a casualty of a different kind of war. Malcolm, age 7, is mentally handicapped, and his mother chooses not to do anything about it.

Ares' struggle with the burden of responsibility -- to himself and to others -- draws him into a world of drugs, violence, and sex that he is not prepared for, launching him into a very personal battle for his own identity, one that has a lethal outcome.

Author: Marisa Silver
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 04/14/2009
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.62lbs
Size: 8.44h x 5.51w x 0.74d
ISBN: 9781416563174


Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 05/10/2009 pg. 28

About the Author
Silver, Marisa: - Marisa Silver is the author of the novel Little Nothing, published in September 2016. Her other novels include Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller's Award. The God of War, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and No Direction Home. Her first collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. When her second collection, Alone With You was published, The New York Times called her "one of California's most celebrated contemporary writers." Her fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles. For more, visit MarisaSilver.com.