Season of Betrayal » (Reprint)

Robertson was an International Correspondent in CNN's London Bureau from 1993 to 2002, primarily covering British news and politics and other European-based stories. She covered the first Gulf War in 1991 and was one of the first female correspondents to report on live television from inside Iraq during the Allied bombing campaign. Earlier in her career, she was Cairo bureau manager for CBS News. Before shifting to broadcast journalism, Robertson freelanced for CBS News from Beirut, for National Public Radio from Poland -- contributed stories to the New York Times from Warsaw, Cairo and Beirut. Robertson is a graduate of Boston University. She is married to CNN Senior International Correspondent Nic Robertson, widely known for his war reporting from around the world. They have two daughters, Lowrie and Nicky, and live in London. This is Robertson's first novel.

An elegant debut novel by a former international CNN correspondent on the marriage breakdown of two American expats with the chaos of civil war in Beirut in 1983 as the story's backdrop.

Publishers Weekly

Lara McCauley, hopeful but, as she notes, "no longer naive" at 29, follows her war correspondent husband, Mac, to Beirut in 1983, when fault lines of international terrorism (then in its embryonic stages) ran through the city just as surely as the Green Line that separated Lebanon's warring factions. Lara, curious and loving, has little in common with seasoned journalist Mac, who has revealed himself over the years of their relationship as a selfish, possessive and abusive bully. When Mac begins an affair with his Lebanese translator, Lara finds a friend in another outsider: the mysterious Thomas Warkowski, a freelance journalist who's rumored to be a spy, and thought to be gay. With her marriage unraveling, and the city's mounting body count dismissed internationally as "Beirut-bang-bang," Lara beds Thomas with far-reaching and catastrophic consequences. Setting the story against the backdrop of a society cruelly tearing itself apart (and punctuating it with the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport), debut novelist Robertson draws a powerful story out of Lara's first-person narration. The author solidly dramatizes the ironies and ambiguities, moral and otherwise, of Lara's desperate encounters. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.