A powerful debut novel about four young soldiers serving in Afghanistan, and the devastating aftermath of war. "An unvarnished, intimately informed dissection of war's physical and emotional derangements." – Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War

Sixteen-year-old Plinko is attending basic training before high school starts up again in the fall. Feeling adrift from his own family, he moves in with an older soldier, where he forges an unlikely group of friends in the military: the very tall Walsh, who moves in shortly after Plinko does; Abdi, whose Somali immigrant parents often welcome the group of young men over for dinner; and the unpredictable and gun-loving Krug, who is brash and exasperating yet magnetic.

After 9/11, the military prepares to move into Afghanistan — to go to war. Plinko and his friends have no idea that the trajectory of their lives is about to be irrevocably altered.

Drawn from the author's experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan, Juiceboxers tenderly traces the story of a young man's journey from basic training, to the battlefields of Kandahar, to the inner city of Edmonton, braiding together questions of masculinity and militarism, friendship and white supremacy, loss and trauma and hard-won recovery.

Benjamin Hertwig was born and raised under big prairie skies and has recently returned to the bright, sad city of Edmonton. As a child, he liked sports publicly and books privately, and since graduating from high school has spent time as a soldier, a student, a bike courier, a tree-planter, a ceramicist, an inner-city housing working, and an English instructor. His first book of poetry, Slow War, was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards and received the poetry prize at the Alberta Literary Awards. His writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and The New York Times, and he is the recipient of a National Magazine Award in personal journalism. He has taught writing workshops to inmates, veterans, and students across Canada. Juiceboxers is his first novel.

Benjamin Hertwig's profile page

"Juiceboxers is an unvarnished, intimately informed dissection of war's physical and emotional derangements. So many moments in Benjamin Hertwig's dark but ultimately tender novel reminded me, with eerie precision, of things I had seen and heard while covering the invasion of Afghanistan – the marrow-deep racism; the casual bloodlust; the desperate need to belong to something, anything. To read this book is to contend with what the enterprise of industrial-scale violence can do to its most active participants, the many ways in which one emerges from so bloody a thing dislocated from who they used to be."

Omar El Akkad

"Tempering harshness with tenderness and humour, Benjamin Hertwig's Juiceboxers maps external and internal territories of conflict with sure grasp of character. A gripping addition to the canon of the literature of war and what comes after.>

Naben Ruthnum