"Shriver has the kind of cojones few English-language novelists possess, male or female
Globe & Mail
Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. Leaving his lucrative career as a lawyer for the sexier world of journalism, he's thrilled to be offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater with a home-grown terrorist movement. Barrington Saddler, the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he's been sent to replace, is exactly the outsize character Edgar longs to emulate.
"The Daring Soldiers of Barba' have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for Barba, a province so dismal, backward and windblown that you couldn't give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do the terrorist incidents suddenly dry up?
It takes guts to write a satire about terrorism- and Lionel Shriver has guts. Shriver is an incisive social satirist with a clear grip on the ironies of our contemporary age - LA Times