Inspired by journalists Christiane Amanpour and Sylvia Poggioli, Midnight, at the War is a novel about a reporter chasing the biggest story of her career as she contends with a tense newsroom, a dangerous global conflict, and all the problems she's running away from at home, by the acclaimed novelist that Megha Majumdar calls "a gem of a writer."
Foreign correspondent Rita Das has left New York for the war-torn Middle East, a reassignment she asks for after she learns she is pregnant and is uncertain whether the father is her husband or her lover. As she strives to shed light on the fallouts of the war, Rita finds herself embroiled in her own conflicts with her interpreter and her news editor, her sources and her colleagues. She is unable to accept the loss of her mother and deal with her guilt for not being at her side when she died.
Fiercely independent and ambitious (and in her journalism, deeply humane), Rita is also in denial about her need for intimate human relationships. As she goes into the field to report on the war, she grapples with the physical and emotional tolls of her pregnant body and a turbulent region where the numbing repetition of war slides suddenly into horror. When her news editor delivers urgent orders for her to return to New York, Rita is faced with a choice about how she wants to live her life as a journalist and a soon-to-be mother.
Set in the years immediately after 9/11, and drawn from Devi Laskar's own experience as a government reporter in the 1990s and early aughts, Midnight, at the War is an exploration of love and grief, of moral ambiguity and forgiveness, of modern war and the wars we wage within ourselves.
"Laskar skillfully portrays the burden of loss and longing in lives defined by trauma." - Washington Post (on Circa)
"[A] tight, insightful novel… By following Heera from high school to adulthood, the author teases out nuanced tensions…A heartbreaking examination of family ties." - Kirkus Reviews (on Circa)
"Circa tells beautifully of the confines of grief, the courage that love compels, and the friendship that is at the heart of every enduring relationship. Devi Laskar is a gem of a writer." - Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning (on Circa)
"A subtle exploration of fate and free will. Keen as a seismologist, Devi S. Laskar traces the reverberations of a violent accident in the life of a young American-Bengali woman from her teen years straddling cultures in suburban North Carolina through her marriage in New York City. Lyrical and defiant, a beautiful and surprising work." - Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral (on Circa)
"It takes place in a morning; it covers a lifetime." - Booklist (starred review) (on The Atlas of Red and Blues)
"As narratively beautiful as it is brutal ... I've never read a novel that does nearly as much in so few pages." - Kiese Laymon, New York Times bestselling author of Heavy
