PARIS METRO reads like a fictionalized memoir. It follows an accomplished foreign correspondent covering the conflict in the Middle East, a role Steavenson herself has played through much of her career. A key success of the novel is her ability to conger from her professional experience a strong sense of what that life is actually like. There is constant motion in search of stories with little grounding other than to colleagues and editors. She depicts those colleagues as committed and cosmopolitan professionals with strong—often cynical—worldviews. Success requires cleverness, luck, connections and especially acceptance of the potential for danger. This lifestyle seems to provide little room for a settled family life in the usual sense. Indeed Steavenson gives us a first person fictional narrative with a deeply conflicted protagonist whose personal life is anything but usual. Instead it seems dark and unsatisfying with few unshakeable core values.

The dichotomies between the professional and personal are apparent everywhere. The narrative depicts sectarian conflicts that lead to lawlessness and violence with few easy answers. Her profession leaves Catherine ("Kit") Kittredge with feelings of “contempt, black humor, (and) cynicism.” She reports on insurgents, fundamentalists, soldiers, and politicians but the most intriguing character in the book seems to be her husband, Ahmed. He is an Iraqi whose father was executed by Saddam. He had a son by a previous wife whom he never divorced before marrying Kit, but expects her to embrace. She does. Steavenson depicts Ahmad as a cipher, not unlike the Middle East in general. He may be a diplomat or a terrorist; he may be a fundamentalist or an atheist; he clearly is adept at prevarication and compartmentalization. He frequently expresses a pragmatic view of the conflict that reveals a person who seems ill suited to support Kit in her struggle with self-doubt. Ahmed tells her things like: “Don’t be fooled by crowds. Crowds are easy to buy,” and “Humanity is a luxury; you need prosperity to have humanity.”

The plot follows Kit from the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan in Paris in 2015. Along the way she reports on the dissolution of Baghdad, the Arab Spring in Lebanon and Syria, and the refugee crisis on the Greek island of Kos. With a deft internal monologue and conversations with minor characters (Zorro the addicted photojournalist, Rousse the ill-fated illustrator, Alexandre and Jean her “godfathers”, and Little Ahmed her stepson) we witness the shaking of Kit’s core beliefs. Throughout, Steavenson is never tempted to offer easy solutions for either Kit or the Middle East.

Despite its considerable strength, PARIS METRO is not without flaws. The key one seems to derive from the very nature of a reporter’s job—to be an unbiased witness. Kit moves from assignment to assignment giving the narrative an erratic feel. Just when the drama seems to build, Kit moves on to something else, leaving a frustrated reader wondering how the last event was resolved. Another problem stems from Steavenson’s overreliance on philosophical discussions among her characters where little is ever resolved. Most of this does not seem to move the story along in meaningful ways. Despite these shortcomings, the novel is a worthy read. ( )

Written from the perspective of a journalist who covered the Iraq War and then the refugee crisis in Europe, this book sometimes feels like a novelization of the last 20 years of news. Kitty, a British-American journalist, goes to Iraq in the early 2000s to cover the conflict and meets Ahmed, an Iraqi man who challenges her preconceptions and captures her heart. She marries him and even converts to Islam to make the marriage possible. But Ahmed carried many secrets - including another wife, a son, and the mysterious work that he does. As this book races towards the 2015 Paris attacks, the challenges of truly knowing a person become clear and the questions of identify loom over the narrative. ( )