From the award-winning author of We, the Drowned comes a brutal, unflinching, and bestselling epic novel of a platoon of soldiers descending into the insanity of the war in Afghanistan. Among them: the commander whose negotiations outweigh scruples; a naive videographer planning to create a monument to the war on the web; a medic unprepared for what a roadside bomb can do to human flesh; the lone woman in the troop burying the trauma of childhood neglect; and Schrøder, the platoon leader. A former designer of computer games, he’s the natural choice for moving his players through the coming chaos. An explicitly brutal portrait of battle told with the propulsion of a harrowing psychological thriller, The First Stone puts readers in the crosshairs between the madness of the imagination and the bestial realities of a conflict without end.