Award-winning journalist Anjan
Sundaram, hailed as “the Indian successor to Kapuscinski”
(Basharat Peer) and praised for “remarkable” (Jon Stewart),
“excellent” (Fareed Zakaria), and “courageous and heartfelt”
(The Washington Post) work, must reckon with the devastating personal
cost of war correspondence when he travels to the Central African
Republic to report on preparations for a genocide hidden from the
world, leaving his wife and newborn behind in Canada
After
ten years of reporting from central Africa for The New York Times,
Associated Press, and others, Anjan Sundaram finds himself living a
quiet life in Shippagan, Canada, with his wife and newborn. But when
word arrives of preparations for ethnic cleansing in the Central
African Republic, he is suddenly torn between his duty as a husband
and father, and his moral responsibility to report on a conflict
unseen by the world.
Soon
he is traveling through the CAR, with a driver who may be a spy,
bearing witness to ransacked villages and locals fleeing imminent
massacre, fielding offers of mined gold and hearing stories of
soldiers who steal schoolbooks for rolling paper. When he refuses to
return home, journeying instead into a rebel stronghold, he learns
that there is no going back to the life he left behind.
Breakup
illuminates the personal price that war correspondents pay as they
bear witness on the frontlines of humanitarian crimes across the
world. This brilliantly introspective, grounded account of one man’s
inner turmoil in the context of a dangerous journey through a warzone
is sure to become a modern classic.