Some of this year's bestselling non-fiction titles have been wartime memoirs written by recent veterans of Special Ops, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The writing hasn't always been heralded, but the candor with which men like Ex-Navy SEAL Team 6 member Matt Bissonnette, and General Stanley McChrystal have shared the realities of war is worthy of commendation.

"The Yellow Birds," a fictional account of the Iraq war written by Iraq war vet Kevin Powers combines the best of both those worlds: Powers, a trained poet, articulates he and his comrades' story with the gritty lyricism of Cormac McCarthy, and reality of someone who tasted the sandstorms, had everything to lose, and stood for something bigger than himself anyway.

Unlike other war memoirs released this year like Bissonnette's infamous "No Easy day" and General McChrystal's "My Share of the Task," 32-year-old Powers mines fiction for the real truth of the war. A machine gunner in Iraq from early 2004 to 2005 who came back to earn degrees from Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of Texas, where he was a Michener Fellow in poetry, Powers wrote "The Yellow Birds" to explain what the war was like in the easiest way he knew how.    

"He's written fiction that seems more real than the 'real' thing-in this case, nonfiction about the same subject-which is what art is supposed to do," said The Daily Beast. 

Powers' novel opens in 2004 when two soldiers, protagonist 21-year-old John Bartle, and a teenaged fellow soldier, Murphy, meet in boot camp on the eve of their deployment to Iraq. Bartle makes a promise to Murphy's mother to bring her son home safely, the two become quick friends, and Bartle takes the younger soldier under his wing as they trudge through their tour.

"Powers ... eyes the casual violence of war with a poet's precision but without romanticism, moving confidently between scenes of blunt atrocity and almost hallucinatory detachment with Hemingway-like economy and prose that shimmers like desert heat," The Daily Beast continued.

Powers wrote the novel a year and half after returning home from the war, while he was still searching for answers about his time fighting in the Iraq conflict.

"I didn't try to make a political statement, but I think any novel that deals with war, how it really is, is anti-war by default," said Powers in an interview with Time.

He added, "... It made sense to use a story as lens through which I could think about my own experience and the larger questions about what it meant to be a soldier in that particular conflict. And more generally, what is the effect of having had that experience and how you return to something resembling normalcy."

Powers plans to follow "The Yellow Birds," his first book, with a collection of poetry and a novel set in Virginia after the end of the Civil War.

"No satirical romp, 'The Yellow Birds' is an elegaic, sober and haunting coming-of-age war story," said Time in its review.

"The Yellow Birds" is available now.