I have to confess that I love American writing. My favourite writer is Cormac McCarthy and I have read Thomas Pynchon, Charles Bukowski, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Auster, Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, Flannery O'Connor, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison and have begun on the entire works by E.L. Doctorow and Elizabeth Strout. There is a surety of language, a confidence American writers exude that I don't often find in Australian writing. They seem to be able to place humans against the environment with little effort, while retaining focus and emotion. McCarthy and Doctorow in particular, are so seamless in their story telling that it is almost as if the reader is pulled through their books.

I am quite excited about McCarthy's The Road being adapted to the screen - it opened 28 January and I will see it this weekend. But to discover E.L. Doctorow is quite fantastic. The March tells the story of the final march across America, at the every end of the Civil War, by the victor General Sherman and his forces. Doctorow picks up and drops characters as the soldiers march through towns and plains and cross marshlands and rivers always moving forward and with a gathering momentum. Ragtime is next on my list of his works, another re-working of the historical fiction genre about America, specifically New York city, from 1906 up until they join World War 1 in 1917. And I am also going to read the previous novels by Elizabeth Strout who wrote the sublime Olive Kitteridge, Abide With Me and Amy and Isabelle.

And while I am praising American writers, David Finkel, another confident American writer but from a journalism background with The Washington Post, spent eight months embedded with the 2-16 Battalion sent into Iraq to spearhead the 2007 surge of troops. The book he wrote as a result of that experience, The Good Soldiers, is a compelling, profoundly moving, observational telling of modern day warfare. Finkel manages, again effortlessly it would appear, to detail the different wars we label as Iraq. The war in Washington, the war on the ground experienced by the US infantry and the chasm that exists between the soldiers and the Iraqi civilian experience. It is at times horrific, confusing and dispiriting but also a masterpiece about all warfare. Finkel shows, with his unwavering eye, measured prose and 'incandescent' imagery what it is to be a US soldier now. He will not let you look away and you won't forget this book.