The New Republic

Synopsis

'A wondrously fanciful plot, vividly drawn characters, clever and cynical dialogue, anda comically brilliant and verisimilar imagined land ...The New Republic is simply terrific.' BOOKLIST Ostracised as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. A disgruntled New York corporate lawyer, he's more than ready to leave his lucrative career for the excitement and uncertainty of journalism. When he's offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognises the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he's been sent toreplace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsized character he longs to emulate. Infuriatingly, all his fellow journalists cannot stop talking about their beloved 'Bear', who is no longer lighting up their work lives. Yet all is not as it appears. 'The Daring Soldiers of Barba' (the SOB) have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal, backward and windblown that you couldn't give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington missing, do terrorist incidents claimed by the SOB suddenly dry up? Part parable, part adventure story, The New Republic addresses weighty issues like terrorism with the deft, tongue-in-cheek touch that is vintage Shriver. It also presses the more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug? What's their secret? And in the end, who has the better life -- the admired or the admirer?