Ghosts by Daylight
A Modern-Day War Correspondent's Memoir of Love, Loss, and Redemption
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Janine di Giovanni has spent most of her career—more than twenty years—in war zones recording events on behalf of the voiceless. From Sarajevo to East Timor, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, she has been under siege and under fire.
Along the way she meets Bruno, a French reporter whose spirit and audacity are a match for her own. Their love affair spans nearly a decade and a dozen armed conflicts before they settle in Paris to raise a family. But Janine soon learns that a life lived in war is inevitably haunted. Bruno struggles with physical and emotional pain, and Janine, a new mother and wife in Paris, is afraid for both Bruno and herself and for the work that they do—and doubtful that she can hold their lives together.
With stunning scenes of action and heart-wrenching accounts of profound love, personal loss, and redemption, Ghosts by Daylight tells the unforgettable story of a passionate life lived to the fullest.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Di Giovanni, an American-born war correspondent (Madness Visible) who's covered conflicts from Sarajevo to Afghanistan, met Bruno Girodon, a French photographer, whom she eventually married after a long, passionate, tortuous courtship, and they settled in Paris to raise their son, Luca, born prematurely after a difficult pregnancy. In beautifully deliberative passages, Di Giovanni depicts the elaborate concoction of her marriage, the renovation of a choice apartment, and the accoutrements of a privileged Parisian life yet Bruno, her modern-day Ulysses, could not settle down. Obsessed by the safety of his family, by survival fears inculcated during wartime, he began drinking heavily, was plagued by depression, and eventually needed hospitalization. Conversely, while her husband seemed to be losing himself, Di Giovanni began to find autonomy for the first time in the strange country of the prickly, exacting French. (Her portrayals of perfectionist Frenchwomen who don't breastfeed because "it ruins your breasts" is priceless.) Her rather scrambled, touching work is about trying to habituate herself within a mad, chaotic world where even love cannot be fixed in place inviting enormous sorrow along with the joy.
