Correspondents

At the heart of Murphy's ambitious second novel (after Christodora) lies half Irish, half Lebenese Rita Khoury, who grows up in rural Massachusetts, attends Harvard, and fulfills her lifelong dream of becoming a reporter for a major national newspaper. In Baghdad at the height of the Gulf War on the kind of assignment she's always wanted, Rita throws herself into the job. But the horrors of the war are far worse than expected, and she comes to depend on her translator, Nabil, whose backstory and family becomes a large part of the novel. Unlike most Iraq war novels, this work delves deeply into the lives of Iraqi civilians and the toll the invasion has taken on their families, their careers, and society at large. It also provides an interesting look into the high-pressure world of journalism. Unfortunately, Murphy's ambition gets the best of him in the lengthy prefatory history of both Rita's and Nabil's families, ultimately diluting the more powerful aspects of the novel.