The Good Lieutenant, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, June 7 2016 Selected as a Notable Book of 2016 by The Washington Post and a Best Book of 2016 by The Boston Globe and Refinery 29. Long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. "Emma Fowler is the embodiment of Terrell's education in the intricacies and ravages of war. She's the scales falling from his eyes, and ours." - The New Yorker. "We are left to wonder about our own lies, when they became acceptable to us, whom we trust and how we've become who we are." - The New York Times Book Review. "Terrell's audacious new novel begins with a literal bang as a U.S. Army patrol in Iraq goes terribly wrong for Lt. Emma Fowler, who is present as her secret lover, Lt. Dixon Pulowski, is critically wounded in an explosion while attempting to recover the corpse of a kidnapped sergeant." - starred review Publishers Weekly "The Bush wars' best novel" - The Guardian 18 incredible Books you need to read this summer - Buzzfeed "One of the most unique and deeply felt" novels of the Iraq war - Men's Journal "An addicting epic about disaster and, more important, what leads to disaster." - The Washington Post "Terrell has taken a stark departure from his Kansas City novels by writing about Fowler and her platoon, a recovery unit retrieving blown up vehicles and dead soldiers in Iraq during the dark days of high American casualties in 2006." - Lit Hub "The details about Emma's trials feel true down to the tiniest details" - the Los Angeles Review of Books "War novels skew decidedly masculine - even as women have taken on greater prominence in the military in numbers and rank. Whitney Terrell breaks from that myopia in "The Good Lieutenant." - The Kansas City Star "The novel's . . . reverse chronology . . . cleverly destabilizes expectations of closure, sidelining questions about the who, what, when of Fowler's failed raid to raise more difficult questions . . . a memorable tale of thwarted optimism, incomplete intimacy, and collateral damage." - Booklist “With The Good Lieutenant, Whitney Terrell has unwound the myths of one of our most encrusted literary form--the war novel--and remade it to be humane and honest, glowingly new and true." - Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son “So exhilarating in its tautly rendered, faultless reality, so timeless in it's play of human emotion in extremis,The Good Lieutenant dazzles and shames us as it breaks our hearts. Whitney Terrell, in Lieutenant Emma Fowler, makes real the confused politics, personal heroism, and human cost of the Iraq War. The Good Lieutenant joins the ranks of great war novels that explain, too late, why victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” - Jayne Anne Phillips, author of Quiet Dell >> Purchase this book

		The King of Kings County, Viking Penguin, August 2005 “On the literary map with Anne Tyler’s Baltimore and William Kennedy’s Albany.” -The Washington Post Book World Jack Acheson’s father, Alton, is not like other kid’s fathers. A con man whose hero is a crooked railroad financier and who believes that thievery is as American as apple pie, Alton hires the school janitor to be his business partner and drums up investment capital from the local mafia—all while taking young Jack along to give him a proper education in the ways of the world. But most important, Alton Acheson has a plan that changes all of their lives and transforms the very city they live in: to build a suburban empire in rural Kings County, Missouri. A stunning, intensely private portrait of one man’s life and his city, The King of Kings County presents a dazzling fifty-year arc through the heart of the American dream, and in the process draws a tender and comic portrait of a family’s suspect pursuit of fortune. “In works by John Cheever or John Updike or Ann Beattie, suburbia becomes an emblem of malaise and compromise . . . But what we haven’t seen dramatized quite so often or so well is how this promised land of the suburbs came to be created . . . [until] Whitney Terrell’s engrossing second novel, The King of Kings County.” —The L.A. Times “A big, fat juicy novel of conflicting values and elusive dreams . . . unforgettable.” - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Mythic yet utterly sensible . . . the prose is pure, generous, hilarious John Irving.” - Entertainment Weekly “Enthralling . . .” - The Wall Street Journal “Whitney Terrell is a remarkable novelist. . . . He knows so much, tells so well in the voice of Jack Acheson, that the unfolding scenes’ serial surprises—always sensual and emotional—seem almost effortless, as natural as breathing.” — Geoffrey Wolfe >> Purchase this book
		The Huntsman, Penguin Books, 2002 “An ambitious, rousing, and entirely spectacular novel about race and class in Kansas City.” – Esquire When a young debutante's body is pulled from the Missouri River, the inhabitants of Kansas City -- a metropolis fractured by class division -- are forced to examine their own buried history. At the center of the intrigue is Booker Short, a bitter young black man who came to town bearing a grudge about the past. His ascent into white Kansas City society, his romance with the young and wealthy Clarissa Sayers, and his involvement in her death polarize the city and lead to the final, shocking revelation of the wrong that Booker has come to avenge. With razor-sharp detail that presents the city as a character as vivid as the people living there, Whitney Terrell explores a divided society with unflinching insight. “In a literary landscape dotted with thin, average books written in thin, average prose, Terrell has done the unthinkable: He has written a determined and bold, serious novel. With the ghosts of Faulkner, Conrad and Melville lurking in his head, Terrell tackles race and history with the sheer force, mysterious undercurrents and filth of the muddy river that serves as the book’s controlling metaphor . . . That Faulkneresque vibe dominates the best sections of the novel, capturing the spark of violence, the inescapability of the past, the blindness of grudges and fickleness of memory. Terrell twists these themes marvelously, mixing honed detail, lush physical descriptions, carved sentences and poised tone rarely found in first-time novelists.” – Chicago Tribune “A Dreiseresque study of Kansas City in the nineties . . . An unsung corner of the American landscape, the city is the real hero here . . . [Terrell’s] excellent at what he does – creating real characters, making them interact in telling ways, and transporting us into his own physical and psychological geography.” – The New Yorker “Downright, wondrous . . . Here’s that rare thing, a first novelist willing to measure his ambitions against the American Classics instead of the moment’s marketplace. Welcome him aboard the raft.” – Russell Banks “Whitney Terrell explores some major puzzles of human behavior in his searing first novel, THE HUNTSMAN . . . it’s rewarding to follow Terrell’s mournful analysis of the forces that changed, and are still changing the city’s racial dynamics.” – The New York Times Book Review “Whitney Terrell has a major gift – it’s nice to know there are folks out there who ‘get it’ with such precision. Terrell writes like a veteran in every respect: his language is mesmerizing, his characters are sharply drawn, his settings are written with enormous care and precision, and the story is downright entrancing. But finally, the thing that puts The Huntsman above and beyond your merely good novel is that it has an eye for the little things, the matters that make life so meaningful, and curious and arresting.” – Reginald McKnight, author of White Boys: Stories >> Purchase this book