Not Untrue & Not Unkind
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
A Man Booker Prize–nominated novel that "vividly re-creates the life of a foreign correspondent" (Booklist).
Owen Simmons is working an easy gig at a Dublin newspaper, having left behind the life of war reporting. Then he finds an old photo, taken in Africa in the era of the Rwandan genocide. It will transport him into a wave of intense memories of dead bodies, orphans, the ravages of wartime epidemics—as well as a woman he once loved, and a shattering event in his past.
From an author who covered Africa for the Irish Times, this is a "gripping" novel of friendship, rivalry, and betrayal among a group of journalists and photographers in the thick of danger and far from home (Daily Mail).
"This atmospheric book authentically carries the sounds and flavors of a Graham Greene novel, reading at times like a memoir with the seamless underbelly of a gritty Hemingwayesque tale." —New York Journal of Books
"A fine, darkly authoritative novel." —Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland
"A book that far transcends the usual literary efforts of the former combat reporter. It stands as an elegy not only for Simmons's band of colleagues but for a golden era of journalism." —The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Loughlin's mixed debut finds newspaperman Owen Simmons in possession of his dead colleague's files and, more importantly, a secret they contain. It is Simmons's ensuing tale of his African war reporting that promises to reveal what that secret is, but late in the book, when a minor character publishes a memoir of sorts that shares the title and characters of this novel, the reader begins to suspect that Simmons has found in his dead colleague a convenient MacGuffin to string readers through his own war stories. They're good anecdotes that evoke the danger of battle, the horror of its aftermath, and the camaraderie of the brooding and maniacal bigfeet, nomads, fixers, stringers, and lens monkeys who witness it, but the intrigue promised in the first chapter doesn't run evenly through the story, and Simmons doesn't give away enough of himself, leaving readers with no one to really care for.
