Adam Kellas’s world—his life—is not just crumbling, but cracking. An aspiring novelist, Kellas was in the midst of writing a thriller about terrorists and destruction in September 2001 when real life overtook his fictional plot. The terrible events of 9/11 left him scarred, disconnected from the people around him and the meaningless passivity of words. Now headed to the battlefields of Afghanistan as a war correspondent, he drives himself toward action, seeking “some violent blow, inarticulate noise or mad mime-show of truth.”