Vulture
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3.2 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A NPR AND THE ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF 2025
A New York Times Editors’ Choice
A darkly funny, heart-wrenching satire that tears through the guts of the war news industry.
Catch-22 on speed and set in the Middle East, Vulture is a fast-paced satire of the war news industry and a tragi-comic coming-of-age novel.
In November 2012, Sara Byrne, an ambitious young journalist, is sent to Gaza to cover a war from The Beach. At the four-star hotel, staff work tirelessly to provide safety, comfort and generator-powered internet for the world's media, even as their own homes and families are under threat.
Sara is determined to use this war to launch her stalling career and win back her lover. So, when her fixer Nasser refuses to set up the dangerous story she thinks will make her name, she turns instead to Fadi, the youngest member of a powerful militant family. Driven by the demons of a damaging, entitled, childhood, Sara will stop at nothing to prove herself, even if it brings disaster upon those around her.
Greenwood’s debut novel draws readers into the dark heart of western media, and with audacity and humour, questions its complicity in the tragedies that feed it.
“So sharp and funny… A superb novel on reporting and war.”
—Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author of Redeployment
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Greenwood debuts with a scathing satire of war journalism centered on an ambitious London freelancer who recklessly throws herself into covering the 2012 Gaza War. Fledgling writer Sara Byrne, 32, is sent to Gaza by the London Tribune to interview survivors of Israeli airstrikes with help from translator Nasser. Determined to live up to the example of her late father, a legendary reporter, she hopes to land an interview with a senior member of Hamas and presses Nasser for help. After he demurs, she turns to Fadi, the nephew of a top resistance commander, who agrees to take her inside the "terror tunnels" where much of the armored machinery and rocket ammo is kept, in exchange for $1,000. Against Nasser's counsel yet blindly eager to prove to her critical mother back in London and her married boyfriend that she's "conquering the bloody cradle of civilization with her understanding," Sara pursues her quest with disastrous results. Greenwood, herself a former Jerusalem-based reporter, gives Sara just the right amount of cockiness and careless resolve to make her ambitions plausible, and despite keeping the focus on an outsider who's at once cynical and naive, the novel provides an unflinching view of the conflict's human toll. This striking protrait of hubris will keep readers glued to the page.
