Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Bronson Pinchot

Audible’s Best of 2010: Audiobook of the Year
Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award
A New York Times Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of 2010
A USA Today Best Book of 2010
A 2010 AudioFile Best Book of the Year
A 2010 AudioFile Best Voice winner
A Barnes & Noble Summer Discover Pick
Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2010
Amazon Best Books of the Year, 2010
Barnes & Noble Best Books of 2010 - Top 10 Fiction Book
iTunes Best Audiobooks of 2010 - Best Audiobook

The novel is set during the winter monsoon season of 1968-69 on and around a fire support base called Matterhorn, located in the mountains of the remote north-western corner of Quang-Tri Province. The protagonist, a young and ambitious Marine lieutenant, wants to command a company to further his civilian political ambitions. Two people stand in his way. The first is a well-loved, combat-weary lieutenant of his own age, who desperately wants out of the bush, but who does not want to leave his Marines with an inexperienced and overly ambitious officer. The second is an angry young leader of the company's radical blacks, who has all the political skill, savvy, and ambition of the protagonist. As the protagonist experiences the costs of combat, he sees the terrible results of his ambition and starts to change, learning that compassion and heart are more important than ambition and skill.

“Matterhorn is one of the most powerful and moving novels about combat, the Vietnam War, and war in general that I have ever read.”—Dan Rather, award-winning TV news anchor

“Marlantes pushes you through what may be one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam — or any war. It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered…Matterhorn is a raw, brilliant account of war that may well serve as a final exorcism for one of the most painful passages in American history.”—New York Times

“Narrator Bronson Pinchot should get a medal for his extraordinary portrayal of Lieutenant Waino Mellas in Marlantes’s debut novel. The author, a former Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran, tells a heartrending, nerve-jangling story of war. Pinchot breathes life into each member of Mellas’s Bravo Company as they inch their way up a strategic mountain in the middle of the Vietnam War. Pinchot allows a tinge of regret to creep into his voice as the men are sprayed with ‘harmless’ Agent Orange and face one seemingly exhausting task after another. A surprise attack by a wily jungle cat heightens the eeriness of the tension-filled environment, a quality that is perfectly matched by Pinchot’s performance. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”—AudioFile

“I've laughed at Catch-22 and wept at The Thin Red Line, but I've never encountered a war novel as stark, honest and wrenching as Matterhorn. Marlantes writes with a spare clarity, but he's unafraid to plumb the emotions of the young men in Bravo Company; the icy bravado of Hemingway or Mailer has no place in these pages. The Marines of Matterhorn are both brave and frightened, both committed and resigned. Their common refrain, ‘There it is,’ denotes acceptance of some new and unfortunate but unchangeable fact. By turns, this book horrified me, crushed me and beat me up, but I found it nearly impossible to stop reading. More than any living American novelist I've read, Marlantes made me feel what I already must have known: that war is worse than hell. There it is.”—Michael Schaub, NPR book reviewer

“Matterhorn will not only take its place on the top shelf of war fiction, it’s going to knock a few books off. It’s that good.”—BookPage

“Marlantes’s epic debut is a dense, vivid narrative…A decorated Vietnam veteran, the author clearly understands his playing field, and by examining both the internal and external struggles of the battalion, he brings a long, torturous war back to life with realistic characters and authentic, thrilling combat sequences…A grand, accomplishment.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A brutally vivid debut novel…The visceral Matterhorn is as much a tribute to the Marine culture of bravery as it is a dissection of a contentious war and a meditation on the American civil rights movement…Marlantes' writing is evocative. We feel the Marines' exhaustion as they dig gun pits, carry dead and wounded comrades, and nearly die from hunger…[Marlantes] pitches us into a harrowing narrative we won't soon forget.”—USA Today

“Even as the Vietnam War recedes into the past, the despair, confusion, and mythology it generated retains a grip on our culture. Debut novelist Marlantes offers a realistic, in-the-trenches look at that war…The battle scenes, at which the author excels, are frequent, brutal, and viscerally energetic, and the skillfully rendered dialog reveals a bunch of strangers attempting to communicate in life-defeating circumstances. In the end, there are no real victors…this is a major work that will be a valuable addition to any permanent collection.”—Library Journal

“The Vietnam novel has come of age, and this is a worthy addition to the genre…The environment is painted in vivid, intense hues: the fog malevolent, the bugs and leeches constant torturers, and jungle rot universal. The enemy is always near and often unseen until firefights explode with shocking savagery…the characters are, if traditional, certainly believable. This tough, unsentimental saga is filled with frightened men; most endure and achieve a certain nobility in spite of themselves. An engrossing chronicle of men at war.”—Booklist

“Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2010: Matterhorn is a marvel -- a living, breathing book with Lieutenant Waino Mellas and the men of Bravo Company at its raw and battered heart. Karl Marlantes doesn't introduce you to Vietnam in his brilliant war epic -- he unceremoniously drops you into the jungle, disoriented and dripping with leeches, with only the newbie lieutenant as your guide…Readers gain a new perspective on the ravages of war, the politics and bureaucracy of the military, and the peculiar beauty of brotherhood.”—Amazon.com

“There has never been a more realistic portrait or eloquent tribute to the nobility of men under fire, and never a more damning portrait of a war that ground them cruelly underfoot for no good reason…There are passages in this book that are as good as anything I have ever read…Vladimir Nabokov once said that the greatest books are those you read not just with your heart or your mind, but with your spine. This is one for the spine.”—Mark Bowden, bestselling author of Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War

Karl Marlantes, a cum laude graduate of Yale University and Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, was a marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten Air Medals. He has lived and traveled all over the world and now writes full time. He and his wife, Anne, have five children and live on a small lake in Washington.