The New Republic - Lionel Shriver

A scalpel-sharp political satire from the Orange Prize winning writer of We Need to Talk about Kevin.

Ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. A disgruntled corporate lawyer, hes more than ready to leave his lucrative career for the excitement and uncertainty of journalism. When hes offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a home-grown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes the disappeared larger-than-life reporter hes been sent to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize 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. Os Soldados Ousados De Barba - The Daring Soldiers of Barba- 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 couldnt 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? Whats their secret? And in the end, who has the better life the admired, or the admirer?

ISBN: 9780007459803

Pages: 373

Hardcover with DJ

HarperCollins, 2012

Good condition

B106