Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
The debut novel from the creator of HBO's Succession, premiering in Summer 2018.
It’s 1994, and war rages on in Yugoslavia—Sarajevo is under siege, and Bosnia’s different ethnic groups are battling for control of the newly independent country.
Hundreds of miles away, in a posh dining room in west London, Andrew is in a similarly precarious situation: the fine balancing act of breathing, blinking, and sipping champagne at the same time. Penny, who may be the love of his life, is about to make the Great Announcement to her parents: that she, Andrew, and a handful of other young idealists are headed to Bosnia to stop the war by performing peace plays from the back of their van.
But more important than peace—does Penny like Andrew, too? Or does she like Simon, who Andrew concedes is “essentially me, only better”? Will this trip across Europe finally bring them together, or will Andrew die in a minefield? And just how long will it take the gang to figure out that Andrew does not, in fact, speak Serbo-Croat?
From one of England’s most lauded comedy writers, Love, Sex, and Other Foreign Policy Goals is a satiric, absurd, and laugh-out-loud romp about tenderhearted, misguided dilettantes traveling through war-torn Europe, with nothing but a half-written script to protect them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first novel, Armstrong, an accomplished film and television writer (Veep, Black Mirror), directs his wonderfully arch gaze on a vanful of do-gooders venturing into war-torn Yugoslavia. Following in the footsteps of Susan Sontag, who famously staged Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, the motley collection of activists decides to "take a peace play to Bosnia and extend the evolution of humanity to a new continuum." Armstrong satirizes the group's na vet , pretentiousness, and blinkered humanitarianism masterfully, all the while sketching a convincing portrait of the Balkans in chaos. Narrating the fiasco is Andrew, a British construction worker with "one of the most coherent foreign policies of anyone working on a building site in the Manchester area." He is motivated less by a conviction that the play will succeed than a crush on one of the group's members, Penny, the beautiful daughter of a well-connected lobbyist who strongly disapproves of the mission. Andrew is a Lucky Jim type, alternately feckless and impish, who gets himself into a series of mortifying or perilous situations, living to tell about it in his amusingly ironic voice: "It was just so dangerous to bury bombs where people might walk," he complains after wandering into a minefield. He is also fundamentally decent, and, unlike some of his companions, a keen observer of the farcical, futile mission. Like the best comedic war literature, Armstrong's novel is ultimately a tragedy of the absurd.
