The Sandbox »

David Zimmerman was raised in Atlanta, Georgia, by an Army Nurse and an Army JAG officer. After receiving his MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama, he spent several years living and working in Brazil and Ethiopia. The Sandbox is his first novel.

In Iraq, a roadside ambush puts a young American soldier onto a high-reaching conspiracy.

The New York Times - Joel Turnipseed

…Zimmerman has more in mind than merely getting a hard-luck soldier into trouble. The Sandbox is loaded with an M.R.E. caseful of plot elements, all pulled from Iraq war headlines—lost billions in cash, prisoner interrogations, soldier indiscretions, failed counterinsurgency plans—and all play their part in bringing Toby's story to its terrible conclusion. That every question in this novel interrogates every other is one of its great strengths and will keep you turning the pages of its short chapters, as each weaves the insistent first-person mystery of "Why me?" with the larger mystery of "What are we doing here?"