Correspondents: A Novel

An Amazon Best Book of May 2019: Tim Murphy is a great writer, but what catapults him to excellence is his ability to immerse readers in hard moments in history. His debut novel, Christodora, focused on the AIDS epidemic, and his sophomore novel follows the life of Rita Khoury, an American-Lebanese foreign correspondent who is dispatched to Baghdad during the first years of America’s invasion in the early 2000s. There, she and her fellow journalists, photographers, and translators—who become more like family—bear witness to the eruption of violence, chaos and unrest. Murphy’s novel spans the generations, giving readers a panoramic view of Rita’s family and what it means to be living in America (and abroad) in the aftermath of September 11th. What makes this novel so good is the characters—the complexity of their lives and familial obligations, the empathy they evoke, the mistakes that they make and the positions they hold—as well as the author’s deftly human portrayal of the Iraq War. Correspondents is proof that the best novels are as important and insightful as nonfiction. —Al Woodworth