Audiobooks by Elliot Ackerman

2054: A Novel

Brought to you by Penguin. From the acclaimed authors of the runaway New York Times bestseller 2034 comes another explosive work of speculative fiction set twenty years further in the future, at a moment when a radical leap forward in artificial intelligence combines with America’s violent partisan divide to create an existential threat to the country – and the world It is twenty years after the catastrophic war between the US and China that brought down the old American political order. A new party has emerged in the US, one that’s held power for over a decade. Efforts to tighten its grip have resulted in mounting violent resistance. The American president has control of the media, but he is beginning to lose control of the streets. Many fear he’ll stop at nothing to remain in the White House. Suddenly, he collapses in the middle of an address to the nation. After an initial flurry of misinformation, the administration reluctantly announces his death. A cover-up ensues, conspiracy theories abound, and the country descends into a new type of civil war. A handful of elite actors from the worlds of computer science, intelligence and business have a fairly good idea what happened. All signs point to a profound breakthrough in AI, of which the remote assassination of an American president is hardly the most game-changing ramification. The trail leads to an outpost in the Amazon rainforest, the last known whereabouts of the tech visionary who predicted this breakthrough. As some of the world’s great powers, old and new, state and non-state alike, struggle to outmanoeuvre one another in this new Great Game of scientific discovery, the outcome becomes entangled with the fate of democracy. Combining a deep understanding of AI, biotech and the possibility of a coming Singularity, along with their signature geopolitical sophistication, Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis have once again written a visionary work. 2054 is a novel that reads like a thriller even as it demands that we consider the trajectory of our society and its potentially calamitous destination. ©2024 Elliot Ackerman (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Elliot Ackerman, James Stavridis (Author), Brian Nishii, Emily Woo Zeller, Eunice Wong, Junior Nyong'o, Vikas Adam (Narrator)

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The Fifth Act: America’s End in Afghanistan

‘His understanding of war is so profound that one feels like secrets have been revealed – truths – information that one day may be necessary for our survival’ SEBASTIAN JUNGER, author of WAR and TRIBE How and why did American involvement in Afghanistan end in tragedy? Elliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and, later, as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August of 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. Afghan nationals who had, for years, worked closely with the American military and intelligence communities now faced brutal reprisal and sought frantically to flee the country with their families. The official US government evacuation process was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe. The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week at its bitter end. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice, Ackerman weaves in a personal history of the war's long progress, beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11. It is a play in five acts, the fifth act being the story’s tragic denouement, a prelude to Afghanistan's dark future. Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war’s trajectory will find a trenchant accounting here. And yet The Fifth Act is not an exercise in finger-pointing: it brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters, American and Afghan, who fought the war with courage and dedication, in good faith and at great personal cost. Understanding combatants’ experiences and sacrifices while reckoning with the complex bottom line of the post-9/11 wars is not an easy balance; it demands reservoirs of wisdom and the gifts of an extraordinary storyteller. It asks for an author willing to grapple with certain hard-earned truths. In Elliot Ackerman, this story has found that author. The Fifth Act is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic.

Elliot Ackerman (Author), Elliot Ackerman (Narrator)

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2034: A Novel of the Next World War

From two former military officers and award-winning authors, a chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034--and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration. On March 12, 2034, US Navy Commodore Sarah Hunt is on the bridge of her flagship, the guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones, conducting a routine freedom of navigation patrol in the South China Sea when her ship detects an unflagged trawler in clear distress, smoke billowing from its bridge. On that same day, US Marine aviator Major Chris 'Wedge' Mitchell is flying an F35E Lightning over the Strait of Hormuz, testing a new stealth technology as he flirts with Iranian airspace. By the end of that day, Wedge will be an Iranian prisoner, and Sarah Hunt's destroyer will lie at the bottom of the sea, sunk by the Chinese Navy. Iran and China have clearly coordinated their moves, which involve the use of powerful new forms of cyber weaponry that render US ships and planes defenseless. In a single day, America's faith in its military's strategic pre-eminence is in tatters. A new, terrifying era is at hand. So begins a disturbingly plausible work of speculative fiction, co-authored by an award-winning novelist and decorated Marine veteran and the former commander of NATO, a legendary admiral who has spent much of his career strategically outmaneuvering America's most tenacious adversaries. Written with a powerful blend of geopolitical sophistication and human empathy, 2034 takes us inside the minds of a global cast of characters--Americans, Chinese, Iranians, Russians, Indians--as a series of arrogant miscalculations on all sides leads the world into an intensifying international storm. In the end, China and the United States will have paid a staggering cost, one that forever alters the global balance of power. Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors' years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid. * This audiobook edition includes an exclusive interview with co-author Admiral James Stavridis.

Elliot Ackerman, James Stavridis (Author), Dion Graham, Emily Woo Zeller, Feodor Chin, P.J. Ochlan, Vikas Adam (Narrator)

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Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning by Elliot Ackerman. In a refugee camp in southern Turkey, Elliot Ackerman sits across the table from Abu Hassar, who fought for Al Qaeda in Iraq and has murky connections to the Islamic State. At first, Ackerman pretends to have been a journalist during the Iraq War, but after he establishes a rapport with Abu Hassar, he reveals that in fact he was a Marine. The two men then compare their fighting experiences in the Middle East, discovering they had shadowed each other for some time: a realisation that brings them to a strange kind of intimacy. Elliot Ackerman's extraordinary memoir explores the events that led him to come to this refugee camp and what, unable to forget his time in battle, he hoped to find there. Moving between his recent time on the ground as a journalist in Syria and his Marine deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, he creates a work of astonishing atmospheric pressure, one which blends the American experience with the perspectives and stories of the Arab world, and draws a line between them. At once an intensely personal book about the terrible lure of combat and a brilliant meditation on the meaning of the past two decades of strife for the region and the world, Places and Names bids to take its place among our greatest books about modern war.

Elliot Ackerman (Author), Elliot Ackerman (Narrator)

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Waiting for Eden: A novel

From the National Book Award finalist, a breathtakingly spare and shattering new novel that traces the intersection of three star-crossed lives. Eden Malcom lies in a bed, unable to move or to speak, imprisoned in his own mind. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his hospital room. He has never even met their young daughter. And he will never again see the friend and fellow soldier who didn't make it back home--and who narrates the novel. But on Christmas, the one day Mary is not at his bedside, Eden's re-ordered consciousness comes flickering alive. As he begins to find a way to communicate, some troubling truths about his marriage--and about his life before he went to war--come to the surface. Is Eden the same man he once was: a husband, a friend, a father-to-be? What makes a life worth living? A piercingly insightful, deeply felt meditation on loyalty and betrayal, love and fear, Waiting for Eden is a tour de force of profound humanity.

Elliot Ackerman (Author), Macleod Andrews (Narrator)

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Dark at the Crossing

Haris Abadi is a man in search of a cause. An Arab American with a conflicted past, he is now in Turkey, attempting to cross into Syria and join the fight against Bashar al-Assad's regime. But he is robbed before he can make it, and is taken in by Amir, a charismatic Syrian refugee and former revolutionary, and Amir's wife, Daphne, a sophisticated beauty haunted by grief. As it becomes clear that Daphne is also desperate to return to Syria, Haris's choices become ever more wrenching: Whose side is he really on? Is he a true radical or simply an idealist? And will he be able to bring meaning to a life of increasing frustration and helplessness? Told with compassion and a deft hand, Dark at the Crossing is an exploration of loss, of second chances, and of why we choose to believe-a trenchantly observed novel of raw urgency and power.

Elliot Ackerman (Author), Vikas Adam (Narrator)

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Green on Blue

From a decorated former Marine, CIA officer, and White House Fellow, a stirring debut novel, an incredible act of empathy and imagination, about a young Afghan orphan. Aziz and his older brother Ali are coming of age in a tiny village in the pine forests and endless mountains of eastern Afghanistan. There is no school, but their mother teaches them to read and write, and once a month she sends the boys on a two-day journey to the bazaar in Orgun. The family is not “large or prosperous,” but, inside their mud-walledhome, they have stability and routine. This is all destroyed in a single day when a convoy of armed men arrive in their village. Aziz and Ali elude these militants, but, in a random act of violence, their parents are taken from them. The boys make their way to Orgun, where they sleep among the orphans in the surrounding hills. They learn to beg, and, eventually, they earn work and trust from the local shopkeepers. Ali saves their money, and sends Aziz to school at the madrassa. When U.S. forces invade the country, the militants launch increasingly brutal attacks, and the brothers find themselves caught in a deadly conflict whose shape they barely comprehend. After Ali is horribly disfigured in a militant bombing, Aziz meets an Afghan wearing an American uniform in the hospital and is recruited into the Special Lashkar, a U.S. funded militia. Driven by a desire for revenge and a need to provide for his brother, Aziz—no longer a boy, but not yet a man—departs for the untamed border region to train as a soldier. Trapped in a conflict both savage and entirely contrived, Aziz struggles to understand his place in this world. Will he embrace the brutality of war or leave it behind, and risk placing his brother—and a young woman he comes to love—in jeopardy? A former Marine and CIA officer, Elliot Ackerman has written a gripping, morally complex debut novel, an astounding act of empathy and imagination about the duplicitous nature of war.

Elliot Ackerman (Author), Piter Marek (Narrator)

Audiobook