“I meet Jesus on the day I get home from the war.”
Warren Harlan Pease, a young U.S. Army sniper coming home from Iraq, walks a dark New Hampshire beach before dawn. A stranger in jeans and a T-shirt approaches out of the first light. He says to call him Ray. Warren knows him as Jesus. Together they revisit those who have shaped Warren’s life: Bethie, his great love; Dodie, their daughter; Ryan, his closest friend; his distant father; and the memory of his mother, whose death has shadowed him since boyhood.
As long-delayed conversations and small mercies unfold, memories of Iraq press in—the sniper’s work, the lives taken and lost, the moral weight Warren carries. Told in Warren’s plainspoken yet eloquent voice, Jesus in the Air joins battlefield realism to the intimacy of home in a searching story of faith, family, guilt, and grace.
Releasing
- “Ambitious and lyrical… worth a dozen Shacks.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
- “A powerful story of one young man’s faith, failings, and redemption.” — Library Journal
- “Haunting and beautiful, rippling with skillfully intertwined themes of faith, love, religion and war… Landis writes with mastery and grace, weaving together fiction and philosophy with profound beauty.” — BookPage
- “Landis probes the bonds between war and faith… sterling dialogue… the back-and-forth between Pease and Jesus is the book’s best feature.” — The Valley News
- “Landis shows a deep knowledge about snipers… he artfully renders the moral negotiations that war has had with himself about being a killer.” — Kirkus Reviews