Praise from Fellow Authors of Still Come Home

"Schultz's ability to enter into these radically different lives is nothing short of breathtaking. There is tragedy here, but also humor, moral blindness, along with deep courage. And the desert holds it all."

"... a remarkable book, impressive in its breadth and depth of story, engaging with its finely-drawn characters, and breathtaking in its pace."

"Start reading and before you know it, you’re miles inside these characters’ lives…By the end, there is much to consider, much to hope for and wish away. Schultz’s razor-sharp syntax casts a spell that lasts through the book itself, and when it’s done, readers will long for whatever place they recognize as home, too."

"Still Come Home took me deep into the chasm between love of country and love of family. As I watched Schultz's characters face impossible decisions with an indomitable will to live, I started highlighting passages I really loved. Pretty soon, I was highlighting entire pages—that’s how good this is."

"Still Come Home is personal, global, tender, brutal, and deeply introspective—in short, a powerhouse of a book. Katey Schultz has written one of the finest works of fiction yet to come out of the Long Wars....[T]he wrong and the right of it, the mercy, the love, the blood-letting and profit-making, Schultz captures it all in this splendid novel."

"There's such nuance in Still Come Home; so much understanding for the characters and their internal and external worlds are so fully realized. Schultz's writerly sense lingers on the most interesting and unsettling elements."

“In Still Come Home, Katey Schultz brings a psychologist’s insight into character and a journalist’s unflinching search for truth to her depiction of the war in Afghanistan. With a compelling plot, and in prose that is both gutsy and lyrical...Schultz has staked a claim as one of the best writers on the war in the Middle East, in a class with Helen Benedict (Sand Queen, Wolf Season), Phil Klay (Redeployment), and Roxana Robinson (Sparta).”

"Katey Schultz’s debut novel, Still Come Home, personalizes the perpetual and distant war in Afghanistan in ways that are as rare as they are remarkable. Through stunning prose and gripping pace, Schultz weaves together the stories of the everyday people of this war, humanizing their perspectives and the stark choices they face. Still Come Home not only provides an excellent example of Schultz’s craft, but it is also an important work for those who wish to better understand our nation’s longest war."  

"Still Come Home is a beautiful book. I know what it means to get inside another world--this one in particular--and I'm full of admiration. I read this and felt as if I was standing right there, alongside the characters. Katey Schultz’s beautiful prose allows us into a place and time most of us don’t know, but which affects us all."

"Katey Schultz's Still Come Home is an acutely perceptive novel about survival and conscience in war. Her three main protagonists -- a young Afghan woman, an unwilling Taliban peon, and a US soldier -- are all struggling in their own ways to find a path through chaos and tragedy while retaining their humanity. The result is a deeply engaging novel about the moral quest of all human hearts: how to do right in a world full of wrong."

"You hold your breath for each of the main characters because Schultz has made you care, viscerally. She does this through alchemic language you’ve never read before, about feelings you’re convinced you’d have if you were on the ground with them, wondering what you would do, wondering if you’d be able to--after all this--still come home." Read the full review here.

"It must be a calling, writing about war, because Schultz penned this masterful novel having written the celebrated story collection, Flashes of War. Really, it's a masterful novel of marriage, loyalty, and self-reliance amid the aftershocks. How Schultz imagines herself into these complicated lives, compromised by forces out of their control, is nothing short of a miracle. Her personal treatment of the disaster is original (in the best/worst way—best that she shows such complicated consequences and worst, the mess we’ve made)."

“What really amazes me about Katey’s writing is that she has an uncanny ability to take the reader into the scenes, the villages, the lives of the people who are experiencing war. She captures perfectly the complex emotions of the soldiers in combat, the people of the country where they fight, the returning warriors, their families and friends as each tries to make sense of their lives. She’s a unique and very, very talented writer.”

"In rich and evocative prose, Katey Schultz masterfully intertwines the fates of three disparate, shattered characters.  As they struggle to reassemble the pieces of their lives amid the betrayals and brutality of war, Schultz takes us on a luminous and enthralling journey deep into the human condition.  The sands and choking dust of Afghanistan become palpable in a story devastatingly beautiful in its impact."