Set in 2018 against the ironic backdrop of an overcrowded, fetid refugee camp on the beautiful, Homeric island of Samos in Greece, The Good Deed follows the stories of five women: Amina, who is nineteen and has just been released from one of Bashar al-Assad's secret and torture-ridden prisons in Syria; Leila, a Syrian widow with two little sons, who has lost her daughter and granddaughter to smugglers on a Turkish beach; Nafisa, who survived civil war and gang rape in Sudan only to see her entire family murdered, save for one daughter; Farah, Leila's lost daughter; and finally, an American named Hilma, who came from New York to Samos to escape her own dark secret, only to become entangled in conflict with the very people she wishes to help.Drawing from four years of interviews with refugees on Samos, along with twelve previous years of work on the Iraq War, Benedict has written The Good Deed as a series of lyrical, intensely felt alternating voices, following these...

Private Kate Carlson is nineteen years old in 2003 when she is deployed to Iraq. On a remote base in a desolate expanse of Iraqi desert, Kate meets a nineteen-year-old Iraqi medical student named Naema, a smart and angry young woman whose father and thirteen-year-old brother have been, she believes, wrongfully detained in the US prisoner camp. Naema would do anything for news of her family, and when she convinces Kate her English is good enough to translate for the other prisoners' families, the two women strike up an uneasy friendship.But the stresses of war may prove too much for their tenuous relationship. Kate enlisted in the Army to show her dad she was tough—but being tough doesn't make her active duty any easier. There's the constant threat of enemy roadside bombings, mortar shellings, prisoner riots—not to mention the danger a female soldier faces at the hands of her own male colleagues. Kate's war experience becomes increasingly sinister, as does Naema's. As each woman takes up arms to protect the people she loves, buried prejudices come unearthed and allies turn hostile. Can two women from such violently opposed backgrounds ever be friends?Culled from real life stories of female soldiers in Iraq, Benedict's novel, the follow-up to her universally acclaimed nonfiction book on the experiences of female soldiers in Iraq, tackles the issue of widespread sexual abuse within the military.

“No one writes with more authority or cool-eyed compassion about the experience of women in war both on and off the battlefield than Helen Benedict. In Wolf Season, she shows us the complicated ways in which the lives of those who serve and those who don't intertwine and how—regardless of whether you are a soldier, the family of a soldier, or a refugee—the war follows you and your children for generations. Wolf Season is more than a novel for our times; it should be required reading." —Elissa Schappell, author of Use Me and Blueprints for Building Better Girls“Fierce and vivid and full of hope, this story of trauma and resilience, of love and family, of mutual aid and solidarity in the aftermath of a brutal war is nothing short of magic. Helen Benedict is the voice of an American conscience that has all too often been silenced. To read these pages is to be transported to a world beyond hype and propaganda to see...