Hilary Plum’s grave and elegant novel They Dragged Them Through the Streets is a bold meditation on human suffering and the sorrowful challenges of men and women striving for collective change.

A veteran of the US war in Iraq commits suicide, and his brother joins with four friends in search of ways to protest the war. Together they undertake a series of small-scale bombings until an explosion claims one of their own. This is an elegy for those two deaths and the war itself. In They Dragged Them Through the Streets Hilary Plum gives form to the anger and troubled idealism of the American home front’s experience of today’s wars.

Moving freely in time among multiple narrators who are seldom named or clearly identified, They Dragged Them Through the Streets highlights the trauma of being unable to hold on to what matters in life, to find a way to alter or influence what cannot be controlled. Poverty, madness, despair, the deep bonds and boundaries of friendship, love, family, national politics, the national obsession with war, addiction, idealism, nostalgia, grief—these all have a place in Plum’s reckoning. This is an innovative work in the great tradition of war literature and a singular chronicle of one generation’s conflicts.