Of Irish and Lebanese descent (with the immigrant experience lushly detailed here), American Rita Khoury works as a journalist first in Beirut, then in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion. Though she studied Arabic at university, Rita is dependent on her interpreter, an ambitious young man from a middle-class Baghdad family hiding a secret that could jeopardize them both. From the author of the eye-opening Christodora, a Guardian Best Book and Andrew Carnegie long-listed debut.

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. VERDICT Distinctive in his look at Iraq, Murphy can also be strident as he touches upon foreign intervention, gun control, Far Right conspiracy theorists, the taboo of being gay in the Middle East and much more. How readers view the book may depend on how they feel about these issues themselves. [See Prepub Alert, 11/19/18.]—Stephen Schmidt, Greenwich Lib., CT

In this ambitious but schematically plotted novel, Murphy (Christodora) refracts the American experience through the lives of an extended Lebanese-American family from 1912 to the early 21st century. The main character, Rita Khoury, is the daughter of Irish and Lebanese parents. Rita is working as a journalist in Beirut when, in the aftermath of 9/11, she is sent to cover the war in Iraq, and her relationships—with Palestinian and Jewish boyfriends and an Iraqi interpreter—and postings in the Middle East and (later) Washington are drawn to encompass the social and political issues that shaped America and the rest of the world around the turn of the 21st century. Rita is well-developed as a character, but as her and her family and friends' lives progress through decades punctuated by those issues—including war, gay coming-of-age, racism, and domestic gun violence—they seem less to be participants in history than hostages to it. Murphy's authorial voice also frequently intrudes in the narrative, as when he uses Arabic words for foods and then immediately explains them in English. The resulting story comes across as more instructive than immersive. (May)