The New Republic

By Lionel Shriver

From the acclaimed author of the National Book Award finalist SO MUCH FOR THAT comes a part parable, part adventure story about a group of foreign correspondents reporting from a nonexistent peninsula of Portugal in the mid-1990s.
Edgar Kellogg , a disgruntled New York lawyer who has always yearned to be popular, is 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 to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize, well-loved character he longs to emulate. 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 vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the SOB suddenly dry up?A droll, playful novel, 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?

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781743095263

Lionel Shriver

Although Lionel Shriver has published many novels, a collection of essays, and a column in the Spectator since 2017, and her journalism has been featured in publications including the Guardian, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, she in no way wishes for the inclusion of this information to imply that she is more “intelligent” or “accomplished” than anyone else. The outdated meritocracy of intellectual achievement has made her a bestselling author multiple times and accorded her awards, including the Orange Prize, but she accepts that all of these accidental accolades are basically meaningless. She lives in Portugal and Brooklyn, New York.