Paris Metro

January 22, 2018
Terrorism arrives on one journalist’s doorstep in Steavenson’s expansive debut novel. Kit has spent her adult life traveling between difficult places—from Baghdad in 2003 to Kos, Greece, in 2015 to cover the influx of Syrian refugees. Along the way, she falls in love with a charming Iraqi, Ahmed—who may be working for the UN or who may just be untrustworthy—and becomes stepmother to Ahmed’s son, known as Little Ahmed. Kit’s friends joke about her chronic “bad luck” because she always narrowly misses the opportunity to witness scenes of violence and catastrophe firsthand. But all that changes when, in 2015, having returned to Paris, Kit first loses a friend in the Charlie Hebdo shootings and later fears that a loved one may have played a role in the November terror attacks. Steavenson, the author of several books of international reporting (The Weight of a Mustard Seed, etc.), skillfully writes about the history and politics of global conflicts; the novel’s first half, which could almost read like a fictionalized journalistic memoir, is balanced by its far more emotional second half. The false dichotomy of an “us vs. them” divide, the lingering prejudices of a protagonist who once thought herself above such things, the knowledge that solutions are rarely, if ever, tidy—all are wrestled with throughout a novel that powerfully merges the personal and the political.

February 1, 2018
Taking the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris as her first novel's starting point, veteran foreign correspondent Steavenson (Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution, 2015, etc.) plunges her characters into the complexities of the post-9/11 world.Like her creator, Kit is a Western journalist who has covered international messes from Baghdad and Beirut to a Greek port overwhelmed by refugees. She marries and then divorces Ahmed, an Iraqi who leaves her with his son from a previous marriage. She also acquires an ambivalent relationship to Islam, to which she converted despite the fact that her husband was an avowed atheist. Although Kit writes an article presenting the point of view of an Islamic fundamentalist, with whom she develops a tentative friendship, terrorist abductions of journalists and militant protests against cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad turn her into a ranting critic of Islam as the enemy of Western tolerance and diversity. It's hard to discern what the author thinks of Kit's attitude, since the book is written in the first person; Steavenson may be agreeing with her character or portraying her as bigoted--or a bit of both--when Kit storms, "Muslims who were born and grew up in Europe are now violently rejecting its values, while at the same time their fellow Muslims are appealing to those values to let them in." Steavenson masterfully evokes Kit's natural habitat: a rootless, cosmopolitan, polyglot world peopled by footloose, cynical, yet covertly committed journalists and diplomats. Among the vividly rendered secondary characters are her childhood friend Zorro, a substance-abusing photojournalist; Rousse, a painter/illustrator for Charlie Hebdo; and her "godfathers" Alexandre and Jean, friends of her journalist father whose long-ago disappearance haunts her. The coordinated attacks of November 2015 form the novel's climax, with Kit on the scene at the Bataclan theater and her terrified adopted son frantically texting her, "Where are you?" "If you have gone to journalist [I'll] never speak to you again." Kit's turbulent relationship with her son, "two mongrel outcasts brought together by fate," is one of the finest things in this very fine novel.Deeply informed by the author's experiences as a journalist but triumphantly transmuted into intelligent and heartfelt fiction.

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January 1, 2018
Kit had been warned that wartime romances are not made to last. She should knowher parents met in 1974 working for the Associated Press in Saigon. Their relationship ended before she was even born. But despite their example, Kit, herself a journalist, falls in love with a Westernized Iraqi named Ahmed in Baghdad after the 2003 American invasion. Ahmed tells her how Saddam Hussein executed his father for being a traitor, and while that turns out to be true, she slowly comes to realize that many of the other stories he has told her about his life are not. In the years following their summer romance, they move to Beirut and then Paris, their own story punctuated with the larger narratives of events like the Arab Spring, Charlie Hebdo, and the 2015 Paris terror attacks. With unflinching realism and complicated, captivating characters, Steavenson tackles the turbulent realities of the war against terror by diving deeply into the history and motivations of the people waging their own personal battles in search of the truth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2018

DEBUT Kit, a half-American, half-British journalist, has spent most of her professional life covering war zones in the Middle East and Afghanistan, where she thrives on the adrenaline rush in the company of a small, makeshift family of fellow journalists, photographers, and diplomats. Stationed in Iraq during the U.S. occupation, Kit embarks on a whirlwind romance with Ahmed, a worldly, Westernized Iraqi who may not be quite who he appears to be. When the book opens in 2015, Kit is living with her 13-year-old son in Paris, and it seems the violence and terrorism of the Middle East have followed them in the form of Islamist attacks; the remainder of the book retraces their steps from Baghdad to this pivotal moment. Orwell Prize finalist Steavenson here makes her fiction debut, but as author of three books of reporting (e.g., Circling the Square), along with countless foreign dispatches, she is intimately familiar with the milieu and the players. VERDICT At times reading more like reportage than fiction in both style and substance, this ultimately engrossing insider's view of complicated geopolitics and conflicted identity doesn't condescend to the reader, offering no simple pieties as it upends stereotypes. [See Prepub Alert, 9/25/17.]--Lauren Gilbert, Sachem P.L., Holbrook, NY

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