Adam Kellas is a war reporter pursuing the woman he has fallen in love with and been separated from. Moving over time and continents this is a beautifully written and yet gritty story of love, loss and war and politics. Quite unputdownable.
Adam Kellas's world-his life-is not just crumbling, but cracking. An aspiring novelist, Kellas was in the midst of writing a thriller about terrorists and destruction in September 2001 when real life overtook his fictional plot. The terrible events of 9/11 left him scarred, disconnected from the people around him and the meaningless passivity of words. Now headed to the battlefields of Afghanistan as a war correspondent, he drives himself toward action, seeking "e;some violent blow, inarticulate noise or mad mime-show of truth."e; In a country that is itself descending into chaos, however, Kellas is not the only broken soul. Astrid, an American journalist who is also struggling to keep her world from splitting apart, is another. As Kellas's plane touches down in Kabul, the last thing on his mind is a relationship-and the last thing he hopes for is redemption. Like his highly acclaimed The People's Act of Love, James Meek's We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a novel that demands to be read and contemplated, its bold cinematic story and complex characters rooted in Meek's own experience as an award-winning journalist. Moving from the mountains of Northern Afghanistan to London and the waterlands of east Virginia, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a tautly paced story of flawed individuals searching for perfect love, set against the incendiary politics and shifting ethics of our time.
'This is a truthful and powerful novel. Does it come anywhere near the Greatest War Reporter Novel podium, whose only occupant, Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, has stood there without serious challenge for 70 years? I think it does. It might have got a little nearer to toppling that great cynic's romp if it weren't for the fact that this is at heart a novel about much more: it's about love, friendship and the struggle to be true in a world that has lost its grip on certainties.' Alex Renton, Statesman
'Meek exhibits such a knowing sense of humour . . . typically audacious.' New Yorker
Author
About James Meek
James Meek was born in London in 1962 and grew up in Dundee. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is his fourth novel. His previous book, The People's Act of Love (2005), won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the SAC Book of the Year Award, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and has been translated into more than twenty languages.
He has published two collections of short stories, Last Orders and The Museum Of Doubt, and contributed to the acclaimed Rebel Inc anthologies The Children Of Albion Rovers and The Rovers Return.
He has worked as a journalist since 1985, and his reporting from Iraq and about Guantanamo Bay won a number of British and international awards. In the autumn of 2001 he reported for the Guardian from Afghanistan on the war against the Taliban and the liberation of Kabul.
