Phoebe Greenwood, a former staff editor and correspondent for the Guardian, swings for the bleachers with Vulture, her audacious debut novel, which is Joseph Heller's Catch-22 meets Fleabag. Sara Byrne is an acerbic, unstable freelance journalist from England assigned to cover the escalating tensions after the Israeli government kills Hamas commander Ahmed Al Jabari in November 2012. Now stationed at The Beach Hotel in Gaza, she's surrounded by fellow war reporters, photographers, and fixers.
Sara is desperate to get into a Hamas "terror tunnel," so she can write "a proper story," rather than what she calls "monkey journalism," by which she means reporting on the same events as everyone else. Complicating her risky efforts are personal issues that threaten to encroach on her professional ones. She is preoccupied with the festering wound left from her father's death two years ago. She's fixated on Michael, an old friend of her deceased father's with whom she had an affair while his wife was undergoing cancer treatment. Sara spirals further when she hears that Michael's left his wife for someone else. Her drive to succeed is not only for the sake of her career but also to impress Michael, and her ruthless pursuit of a scoop leads to all kinds of hijinks, and eventually, catastrophe.
Vulture is not for the easily queasy. Readers can expect comically rendered bad behavior, graphic bodily functions, and the devastating cruelties and tragedies of war. In Greenwood's keen and capable hands, the effortless prose makes the story all the more impactful. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator