The New Republic

Edgar Kellogg, a disgruntled New York lawyer who has always yearned to be popular, is more than ready to leave his lucrative career for the excitement and uncertainty of journalism.

When he's offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognises the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he's been sent to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize, well-loved character he longs to emulate. Yet all is not as it appears.

'The Daring Soldiers of Barba' (the SOB) have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal, backward, and windblown that you couldn't give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the SOB suddenly dry up?

A droll, playful novel, The New Republic addresses weighty issues like terrorism with the deft, tongue-in-cheek touch that is vintage Shriver. It also presses the more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug?

What's their secret? And in the end, who has the better life - the admired, or the admirer?