Marine, novelist, dad: a conversation with Elliot Ackerman

Elliot Ackerman served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the three-time novelist doesn’t want readers to only see him as “the war guy.” His most recent 192-page novel, “Waiting for Eden,” is not a book about war, he says. It’s a book about love and communication – and what we do when there is no hope.

While war does cause the injuries that confine the titular character Eden Malcolm to a hospital bed for three years, the central conflict of “Waiting for Eden” revolves around Mary,