The Marines of Autumn

In this epic novel of the Korean War, a US Marine captain joins MacArthur in the Chosin River campaign and wonders if he’ll ever see his daughter again.

“The Korean war now has its own Iliad. Historically precise and harrowingly poetic.” —Kurt Vonnegut

When USMC Captain Thomas Verity is called back to action, he must leave his Georgetown home, career, and young daughter and rush to Korea to monitor Chinese radio transmissions. At first acting in an advisory role, he is abruptly thrust into MacArthur's last daring and disastrous foray—the Chosin Reservoir campaign—and then its desperate retreat.

This is a stunning, shattering novel of war illuminated only by courage, determination, Marine Corps discipline, and by love: of soldier for soldier, of men and their women, and of a small girl in Georgetown, whose father promised she would dance with him on the bridges of Paris—a child Captain Verity fears he may never see again.

In The Marines of Autumn, James Brady captures our imagination and shocks us into a new understanding of war.

“The Marines of Autumn is a you-are-there epic story that portrays the horror and the heroism of the corps' finest yet most critical hour. A truly gripping tale of a war that America has sadly forgotten.” —David Hackworth, US soldier, Korea, 1950

“Right up there with the very best of combat writing and is destined to become one of the defining novels of the genre.” —Nelson DeMille, author of The Lion’s Game

“An epic story worthy of the ancient Greeks. Riveting. A truly first-rate novel of the Korean War.” —Dan Rather

“[The Marines of Autumn] transforms his bitter memory of the conflict into a gritty reconstruction of one of the war’s most harrowing moments. . . . Mr. Brady knows the war, the smell and the feel of it.” —The New York Times