The Last Kestrel

In BBC journalist McGivering’s fiction debut, veteran war correspondent Ellen Thomas returns to battle-ravaged Afghanistan to cover the conflict and investigate the recent violent death of her translator, Jalil. Ellen guiltily recalls the last conversation she had with Jalil; favoring neutrality over personal involvement, she declined to give Jalil a loan that could have helped him leave his fractured country. But now she promises his family that she will investigate his murder, though the facts may prove too explosive to reveal. Meanwhile, embedded with British soldiers, Ellen discovers a 40-something Afghan woman named Hasina, wounded in an airstrike but alive beneath the rubble of her home. Wary of her rescuers and taken to camp for treatment, Hasina is frantic to find her son, severely injured and hiding in a Russian-built underground bunker network after his own attempted suicide bombing. The unrelenting landscape is rendered as a character that everyone struggles against, particularly when trying to move within the claustrophobic tunnels and caves; “Jagged ridges of mountains rising, sharp with shadows and the contours of vast bite marks gouged out of the earth.” McGivering’s prose is infused with the gritty realism of combat horrors and buoyed by the suspended moments of humanity one finds in war. (Jan.)