We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
A Novel
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“[A] sharply observed meditation on modern war . . . as far from Tom Clancy’s entertainments as a vintage Mini Cooper is from a snarling Hummer” (Alex Berenson, The New York Times Book Review).
James Meek’s masterful historical novel, The People’s Act of Love, received accolades around the world, earning Meek comparisons to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, and Greene. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is a tour de force of storytelling, furthering his reputation as one of the most exciting and original young novelists writing today.
Adam Kellas, a British journalist, would-be thriller novelist, and failed lover meets Astrid Walsh, a self-possessed, hard-charging reporter while the two are covering allied military operations in the Afghan mountains. After sharing one passionate night in a watchtower near a defunct airfield, Astrid disappears from Adam’s life.
A year later, following a disastrous dinner party in London during which he destroys his few remaining friendships, Adam receives a short, beseeching email and hastily embarks on a transatlantic journey to a small town near the Chesapeake Bay where he believes Astrid waits for him. He envisions the fresh start his new life with Astrid might offer, unaware that she may be harboring unsettling secrets of her own.
A passionate, incisive novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent lays bare the entwined hypocrisies, foibles, and desires of our age, and is a testament to the obsessive pull of love.
“I am full of admiration for Meek’s precise and lyrical prose, for his mapping of the political landscapes through which his characters drift and for his evocation of the strange, torn geometries of the life in the global news stream.” —The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The author of The People's Act of Love returns with the midlife deconstruction of a reluctant war correspondent working in post-9/11 Afghanistan. What Scots journalist Adam Kellas truly wants is to be a bestselling novelist, but he watches aghast on 9/11 as the planned climax of his latest thriller-in-the-works becomes reality in lower Manhattan. Disappointed, he puts down his manuscript, takes an assignment in Afghanistan covering the subsequent war and falls for an American journalist, Astrid, who leads him into a dangerous blurring of the lines between observer and participant. On his return to the U.K., these conflicts boil over when Kellas attends a dinner party with his poet school chum Patrick M'Gurgan. The fallout combined with a large advance offered on his next thriller (an imagined war between America and Europe) leads Kellas on a wild journey to see Astrid, who's living near Chesapeake Bay. Meek's novel exhibits some irritating tendencies a muddled narrative line, a romance with a few cloying moments and overindulgent digressions into philosophy but Kellas's unraveling is deliciously enjoyable, and Meek's crafting of character and setting is often masterful. The result is a book that demands much patience from the reader, but delivers rewards in return.
