Through the character of Edgar Kellogg, ex fat kid, ex corporate lawyer and now wannabe journalist, Shriver explores the lengths you’ll go to and the things you’ll do when you are desperate to be known. It’s also important to remember, and interesting to note, when you read this that it was written in 1998, five years before her Orange Prize winner. A time capsule piece of wit, cynicism and satire.
Click here to view the page for Big Brother by the same author, which is due out in hardback on 9 May 2013.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
| Recommendations: |
A scalpel-sharp political satire from the Orange Prize winning writer of We Need to Talk about Kevin Ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. A disgruntled corporate lawyer, he's more than ready to leave his lucrative career for the excitement and uncertainty of journalism. When he's offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a home-grown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he's been sent to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize character he longs to emulate. Infuriatingly, all his fellow journalists cannot stop talking about their beloved Bear, who is no longer lighting up their work lives. Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados De Barba - The Daring Soldiers of Barba - have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal, backward and windblown that you couldn't give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the SOB suddenly dry up? A droll, playful novel, The New Republic addresses weighty issues like terrorism with the deft, tongue-in-cheek touch that is vintage Shriver. It also presses the more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug? What's their secret? And in the end, who has the better life -- the admired, or the admirer?
The New Republic features in the following genres: Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Books of the Month, eBooks of the Month, General Fiction, Fiction, Recommendations
The New Republic is available in Paperback, Hardback
The New Republic was written by Lionel Shriver and published by Harper an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
The New Republic has 380 pages
£11.69
