Operating Base Cornucopia. A three-hundred-year-old fortress in the remote Iraqi desert where a few dozen soldiers wait for their next assignment, among them Private Toby Durrant, a self-described "broke nobody." Then a deadly ambush touches off events that put Durrant in the middle of a far-reaching conspiracy. Insurgents massing in the nearby hills, a secretive member of military intelligence, an abandoned toy factory and a mysterious, half-feral child-Durrant must figure out the links between them if he's to survive. This blistering look at military life in "the sandbox" of Iraq marks the debut of a major new talent.

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.