Racing To Make The Sun Stand Still

In the mountains of Afghanistan, every voice has a story. Every story ends in death.

Steven Jeffries never planned to become a spy. A gifted linguist who learned Russian to get closer to a girl who never noticed him, he finds himself recruited by the Navy and eventually the CIA and deployed to the Hindu Kush-one of a handful of Americans providing real-time intelligence to mujahideen fighters armed with America's most advanced weapons.

His job is to listen to Soviet radio communications, translate them, and pass the information along. But Steven is carrying more than classified equipment into those mountains. He's carrying a secret that could destroy his career, his safety, and any chance at the life he wants: he's gay, in an era and a profession where that truth is unthinkable.

At 11,000 feet, with headphones pressed to his ears, Steven begins to hear more than tactical coordinates. He hears the Soviet pilots joking about their families. The worry in their voices. The final, desperate words of men who will never go home. Every intercept he logs saves lives on one side and ends them on the other.

As the war intensifies and the lines between right and wrong blur beyond recognition, Steven must navigate not only the deadly cat-and-mouse game with Soviet forces, but the impossible terrain of his own identity-in a world where being himself could be as dangerous as any enemy.

A searing literary war novel about moral injury, hidden identity, forbidden desire, and the voices that haunt us long after the shooting stops, Racing To Make The Sun Stand Still is an unflinching portrait of a covert war and the invisible cost of victory.