Introduction

“Murphy artfully connects multiple narratives to produce a sprawling tale of love, family, duty, war, and displacement. It is above all a stinging indictment of the ill-fated war in Iraq and the heavy tolls it continues to exact on its people.”?Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

The world is Rita Khoury’s oyster. The bright and driven daughter of a Boston-area Irish-Arab family that has risen over the generations from poor immigrants to part of the coastal elite, Rita grows up in a 1980s cultural mishmash. Corned beef and cabbage sit on the dinner table alongside stuffed grape leaves and tabooleh, all cooked by Rita’s mother, an Irish nurse who met her Lebanese surgeon husband while working at a hospital together. The unconventional yet close-knit family bonds over summers at the beach, wedding line-dances, and a shared obsession with the Red Sox.

Rita charts herself an ambitious path through Harvard to one of the best newspapers in the country. She is posted in cosmopolitan Beirut and dates a handsome Palestinian would-be activist. But when she is assigned to cover the America-led invasion of Baghdad in 2003, she finds herself unprepared for the warzone. Her lifeline is her interpreter and fixer Nabil al-Jumaili, an equally restless young man whose dreams have been restricted by life in a deteriorating dictatorship, not to mention his own seemingly impossible desires. As the war tears Iraq apart, personal betrayal and the horrors of conflict force Rita and Nabil out of the country and into twisting, uncertain fates. What lies in wait will upend their lives forever, shattering their own notions of what they’re entitled to in a grossly unjust world.

Epic in scope, by turns satirical and heartbreaking, and speaking sharply to America’s current moment, Correspondents is a whirlwind story about displacement from one’s own roots, the violence America promotes both abroad and at home, and the resilience that allows families to remake themselves and endure even the most shocking upheavals.

Editorial Review

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

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