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CORRESPONDENTS

Tim Murphy

Epic in scope, by turns funny and poignant, and moving from New England to the Middle East, CORRESPONDENTS is a powerful story about the legacy of immigration, the present-day 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 post-9/11 wars and their legacy, CORRESPONDENTS is a powerful novel that centers on Rita Khoury, an Irish-Lebanese woman whose life and family history mirrors the story of America. Both sides of Rita’s family came to the United States in the golden years of immigration, which we see beautifully rendered in the first part of the novel, 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, she finds for the first time in her life that her safety depends on someone else, her talented interpreter Nabil al-Jumaili, an equally driven young man from a middle-class Baghdad family who is hiding a secret about his sexuality. As Nabil’s identity threatens to put him in jeopardy and Rita’s position becomes more precarious as the war intensifies, their worlds start to unravel, forcing them out of the country and into an uncertain future.

Praise for Christodora:

Longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Named a Best Book of the Year by the Guardian

An Indie Next Selection

An Amazon Editors’ Top 100 Best Books of the Year

A Publishers Weekly Big Indie Book of Fall 2016

“Powerful . . . Hugely ambitious . . . [A] rich, complicated story . . . No book has made me feel so intensely not just the ravages of AIDS but also the devastating cost of activism . . . Christodora recounts a crucial chapter in the history of queer life, which is to say in the history of American life. It’s also, for all the despair it documents, a book about hope.”

– Garth Greenwell, Washington Post

“[A] thrillingly accomplished novel . . . [The] varied minds and voices are realized so convincingly that Christodora sometimes seems the product of spirit possession. . . . [J]oyous despite its subject matter . . . Desperately intense, it is the kind of scene that requires putting a book down for a moment to take a breather.” – New York Times Book Review

Available products
Book Published 2019-05-14 by Grove Atlantic

Comments

“Finely tuned, well-researched … propulsive and engrossing and rooted in the simplest of storytelling points: Empathy can erase prejudice. … Murphy delivers a fresh, affecting restatement of that time-honored message. A surprisingly moving war novel alert to global violence and politics but thriving on the character level.”

“CORRESPONDENTS is the novel I’ve been hoping would emerge for a long time. Some might classify it as an American epic, or an epic of the 9/11-Wars, or even a Middle Eastern epic; however, like all great art it asserts our shared humanity across categorizations. So, ultimately, the story of Rita and Nabil transcends categorization itself to become a human epic, one you won’t soon forget.” – Elliot Ackerman, author of Waiting for Eden

“CORRESPONDENTS is an ambitious and confident novel that succeeds brilliantly in being both epic and intimate. Tim Murphy strides across generations, continents, and war zones to tell an unforgettable story about family, immigration, and what has become of the American Dream. Murphy’s imagination, insight, and empathy are extraordinary, and in Correspondents as in his previous novel Christodora, he has produced an important political and historical document as well as an immensely entertaining read.” – Stephen McCauley, author of My Ex-Life