Correspondents

Correspondents by Tim Murphy is a powerful story about the legacy of immigration the presentday world of refugeehood the violence that America causes both abroad and at home and the power of the individual and the family to bring good into a world that is often brutal. Spanning the breadth of the twentieth century and into the post911 wars and their legacy Correspondents is a powerful novel that centres on Rita Khoury an IrishLebanese woman whose life and family history mirrors the story of modern America. Both sides of Ritas family came to the United States in the golden years of immigration and in her home north of Boston Rita grows into a stubborn perfectionist and relentlessly bright young woman. She studies Arabic at university and moves to cosmopolitan Beirut to work as a journalist and is then posted to Iraq after the American invasion in 2003. In Baghdad Rita finds for the first time in her life that her safety depends on someone else her talented interpreter Nabil alJumaili an equally driven young man from a middleclass Baghdad family who is hiding a secret about his sexuality. As Nabils identity threatens to put him in jeopardy and Ritas position becomes more precarious as the war intensifies their worlds start to unravel forcing them out of the country and into an uncertain future.