The Warlord's Son [Hardcover]

Fesperman, author of Small Boat of Great Sorrows, a critically acclaimed espionage thriller set in Bosnia, now turns his sights on war-zone journalism in this chilling, timely novel. Newspaper reporter Skelly (aka Stan Kelly) is a former hotshot war correspondent, now a burned-out hack covering town meetings for a Midwestern daily. Five weeks after 9/11 he is given a chance—his last chance to get back in the game, he believes—to cover the war on terror, the Taliban and Afghanistan. In Peshawar, Skelly hires Najeeb, a bright fixer who speaks English and mountain dialects. What Skelly doesn't realize is that Najeeb is an outcast from his tribal clan and an unwilling informer for the Pakistani secret police; Najeeb is also involved in a dangerous, illicit affair with Daliya, who's being punished by her family for resisting an arranged marriage. Battling the pollution and bureaucratic corruption of Peshawar, Skelly and Najeeb try to find a way into Afghanistan. They finally manage to join a warlord's entourage, but just before they leave, Daliya goes missing. Forging ahead, Skelly and Najeeb develop an enduring friendship, tested by their harrowing journey into Afghanistan. Capture, escape and shocking revelations finally save one man and condemn the other in this gripping portrayal of shameless media frenzy and hopeless geopolitical gamesmanship.
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Adult/High School–A superbly written tale of betrayal, brutality, and courage. Skelly (a slurring of Stan Kelly) is a thrice-married, journalistic warhorse, a veteran of hot spots from Managua to Sarajevo to the Kuwaiti deserts. Suffering burnout, he returns to the U.S., but "three years of the suburbs of the Midwest had left [him] forgetful of past lessons." Now in Pakistan, he plans to cross the border into post-9/11 Afghanistan in hopes of a career-crowning story. The warlord's son of the title, Najeeb, is his translator/guide, a Pashtun whose father has banished him from his native country. Further complicating Najeeb's political and familial situation is his live-in relationship with cosmopolitan Daliya, which places them both in cultural jeopardy. The plot is a heart-stopping drama (a rope-bridge crossing straight out of Indiana Jones; a grisly hanging) even as the author weaves everyday cultural realities into deeply affecting scenes; Daliya's visit to a burqa shop is both enlightening and sobering. With a polished writing style, Fesperman delivers plot twists, adept characterization, attention to detail, and a masterful use of setting, making The Warlord's Son highly recommendable to teens who enjoy a quality reading experience.–Dori DeSpain, Fairfax County Public Library, VA

Leaving the Eastern Europe of his well-received Lie in the Dark (1999) and Small Boat of Great Sorrows (2003), Fesperman turns to another region he has covered as a Baltimore Sun reporter. Afghanistan is being bombed by American warplanes in retaliation for 9/11, and Stan Kelly ("Skelly") is hoping to close out his long reporting career with a big story and an Afghan dateline. Setting up first in Peshawar, Skelly hires an Afghan "fixer," Najeeb Azam, to translate and run interference for him across the border. Najeeb, though, has his own issues: his fiancee has gone missing; he's being coerced by the Pakistani secret police into informing on Skelly; and he finds their party heading to his home village, run by his warlord father, whom Najeeb, under torture, betrayed to authorities seven years before. Plot-driven fans might not see this slowly paced book to the end, but Fesperman offers a level of cultural and political nuance not always found in adventure thrillers. Alan Moores
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

“In ‘The Warlord’s Son’, Dan Fesperman, an American foreign correspondent who covered the war in Afghanistan, succeeds in writing a convincing, accurate thriller . . . This book is worth reading if only for the passage where the hero, Skelly, glimpses Osama bin Laden at a public hanging; the scene both convinces and frightens.”
–The Economist

“A terrific novel of intrigue, duplicity and death in the shadow of the Khyber Pass . . . Fesperman is that rare journalist who is also a gifted novelist . . . ‘The Warlord’s Son’ deserves the attention of anyone who is open to first-rate fiction about war, journalism and the dark, dangerous worlds called Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
–The Washington Post

“Fesperman offers a level of cultural and political nuance not always found in adventure thrillers.”
–Booklist

“Fesperman, author of Small Boat of Great Sorrows, a critically acclaimed espionage thriller, now turns his sights on war-zone journalism in this chilling, timely novel . . . [A] gripping portrayal of shameless media frenzy and hopeless geopolitical gamesmanship . . . his detailed insider’s account of war reporting will be catnip for news junkies.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Dan Fesperman has written two superb novels concerning war-torn Yugoslavia from two different perspectives of time . . . Lie in the Dark won the Creasey Award for best first crime novel and The Small Boat of Great Sorrows won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller. Now he returns in by far and away his best work to date. In a sense it is sweeping in grandeur like Doctor Zhivago, yet intimate enough to be reminiscent of a Graham Greene and as a thriller intelligent enough to be in the same ranks of John LeCarre. However, I predict Dan Fesperman will ultimately equal them in fame writing his own type of stylistic war novels. This one is a masterpiece.”
–Larry Gandle, Deadly Pleasures

“His experience reporting firsthand for the Baltimore Sun made The Small Boat of Great Sorrows the best thriller to come out of the Bosnian War. Now, he goes to the Tribal Lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the last days of the Taliban . . . Bleak and gritty, but thoroughly believable.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“A thrilling odyssey into Afghanistan during the waning days of Taliban rule . . . a kind of post-modern ‘Heart of Darkness’.”
–Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Compelling . . . I knew I could not sleep until finishing it.”
–Baltimore Sun

“A first-rate geopolitical yarn . . . Fesperman combines his strong eye for detail with bleak film-noir cynicism, managing to make plot twists that could have felt contrived seem depressingly believable.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“A new book by Dan Fesperman is becoming a major literary event . . . Fesperman’s experience as a war correspondent, together with his powers of description and characterisation, produce an utterly compelling thriller and quite simply the best I’ve read all year.”
–Sunday Telegraph

His last novel, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows, was hailed as “a relentlessly crackling mystery and adventure tale” (The Baltimore Sun) and “a new standard for war-based thrillers” (Los Angeles Times). In this electrifying new thriller, Dan Fesperman takes us to present-day Afghanistan–the global capital of death long before it became a battleground for America–where the fates of an American journalist and a Pakistani translator become dangerously intertwined with the fortunes of warlords, spies, and dubious corporate interests.

A burned-out war correspondent hoping for a last hurrah in Afghanistan, Skelly arrives on the Afghan border just as American bombs begin falling on the ruling Taliban. Seeking the scoop of a lifetime as witness to the capture of “the biggest fish of them all,” he links up with an exiled warlord’s quixotic expedition. Guiding Skelly’s way is Najeeb, a tribal Pakistani with his own objective–U.S. visas for his girlfriend and himself, promised by Pakistani intelligence if he acts as an informant.

A harrowing crossing into Afghanistan is only the beginning of trouble for the two men. Their journey quickly escalates into a race for their lives as they are pulled into a vortex of intrigue, betrayal, and violence. Finally, only their loyalty to each other holds out the possibility of survival for either of them.

Fast-paced, timely, and galvanizing from first to last.

“In ‘The Warlord’s Son’, Dan Fesperman, an American foreign correspondent who covered the war in Afghanistan, succeeds in writing a convincing, accurate thriller . . . This book is worth reading if only for the passage where the hero, Skelly, glimpses Osama bin Laden at a public hanging; the scene both convinces and frightens.”
–The Economist

“A terrific novel of intrigue, duplicity and death in the shadow of the Khyber Pass . . . Fesperman is that rare journalist who is also a gifted novelist . . . ‘The Warlord’s Son’ deserves the attention of anyone who is open to first-rate fiction about war, journalism and the dark, dangerous worlds called Pakistan and Afghanistan.”
–The Washington Post

“Fesperman offers a level of cultural and political nuance not always found in adventure thrillers.”
–Booklist

“Fesperman, author of Small Boat of Great Sorrows, a critically acclaimed espionage thriller, now turns his sights on war-zone journalism in this chilling, timely novel . . . [A] gripping portrayal of shameless media frenzy and hopeless geopolitical gamesmanship . . . his detailed insider’s account of war reporting will be catnip for news junkies.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Dan Fesperman has written two superb novels concerning war-torn Yugoslavia from two different perspectives of time . . . Lie in the Dark won the Creasey Award for best first crime novel and The Small Boat of Great Sorrows won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller. Now he returns in by far and away his best work to date. In a sense it is sweeping in grandeur like Doctor Zhivago, yet intimate enough to be reminiscent of a Graham Greene and as a thriller intelligent enough to be in the same ranks of John LeCarre. However, I predict Dan Fesperman will ultimately equal them in fame writing his own type of stylistic war novels. This one is a masterpiece.”
–Larry Gandle, Deadly Pleasures

“His experience reporting firsthand for the Baltimore Sun made The Small Boat of Great Sorrows the best thriller to come out of the Bosnian War. Now, he goes to the Tribal Lands between Pakistan and Afghanistan in the last days of the Taliban . . . Bleak and gritty, but thoroughly believable.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“A thrilling odyssey into Afghanistan during the waning days of Taliban rule . . . a kind of post-modern ‘Heart of Darkness’.”
–Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Compelling . . . I knew I could not sleep until finishing it.”
–Baltimore Sun

“A first-rate geopolitical yarn . . . Fesperman combines his strong eye for detail with bleak film-noir cynicism, managing to make plot twists that could have felt contrived seem depressingly believable.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“A new book by Dan Fesperman is becoming a major literary event . . . Fesperman’s experience as a war correspondent, together with his powers of description and characterisation, produce an utterly compelling thriller and quite simply the best I’ve read all year.”
–Sunday Telegraph

Dan Fesperman is a former foreign correspondent who worked in Baltimore Sun’s Berlin bureau during the years of civil war in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in Afghanistan during the recent conflict. Lie in the Dark won the Crime Writers Association of Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel, and The Small Boat of Great Sorrows won its Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

The sun does not rise in Peshawar.

It seeps--an egg-white smear that brightens the eastern horizon behind a veil of smoke, exhaust and dust. The smoke rises from burning wood, cow patties and old tires, meager flames of commerce for kebab shops and bakers, metalsmiths and brick kilns. The worst of the exhaust sputters from buzzing blue swarms of motor rickshaws, three-wheeled terrors that careen between horse carts and overloaded buses.

But it was the dust that Najeeb Azam knew best. Like him, it had swirled down from the arid lands of the Khyber and never settled, prowling restlessly in the streets and bazaars as if awaiting a fresh breeze to carry it to some farther, better destination.

In the morning it coated his pillow, a faint powder flecked with soot. In the evening he wiped it from his face and coughed cinders into a handkerchief, never quite able to flush it from either pores or lungs. Wherever he traveled it went along for the ride, a parasite, a little gift from his adopted home. He was respectful of its mysterious cloaking powers, because things had a way of disappearing in Peshawar--people, ideas, entire political movements. They would be loud and noticeable one day, only to vanish without a trace the next, and with each new day someone or something else always seemed to have gone missing.

A Peshawar dawn nonetheless had its charms, and Najeeb liked to rise early to savor them. So, on a warm morning in mid-October he stood in the darkness of his small kitchen a half hour before sunrise, brewing tea while listening to Mansour's horse cart leaving for the bazaar. He knew without looking that the old man stood like a charioteer on a narrow wooden flatbed, reins in hand, pomegranates and tomatoes piled behind him, the baggy folds of his shalwar kameez flowing ghostlike in the pale light. The lonely clip-clop was soothing, yet also a sort of warning, like the ticking of a bomb. It was part of Peshawar's daily countdown to chaos. Soon enough the narrow streets would explode with vehicles, animals and people, beggars and merchants elbow to elbow as both cried out for rupees.

The loudspeaker of a nearby mosque crackled to life. Najeeb strolled to the living room, setting his teacup on a shelf and kneeling, lowering his forehead to the rug in prayer. This, too, was a ritual of tranquillity, yet it never seemed quite peaceful enough here.

In the tribal lands of his boyhood the muezzin's cry had been a solitary call, haunting and lovely. He used to pretend the message was for him alone, and to Najeeb there was still no grander expression of power than the words Allahu akbar, "God is great," when carried on a morning breeze across empty countryside. But in Peshawar there were more muezzins than he could count, and their calls became an unruly conversation--one voice trumping another in a war above the rooftops. Cats yowling over turf. Or perhaps Najeeb was turning into an infidel, a worldly backslider. A Kafir, as his father's Pashtun tribesmen would have said. Life never seemed half so holy now as it once had, and in a country where not only a man's calling but also his marriage was generally set in stone by age eighteen, Najeeb was still a work in progress at twenty-seven.

As a boy he'd roamed a wonderland of extremes, a rural princeling at play among bearded, turbaned men with rifles slung on their backs, all of whom owed their allegiance to his father. After breakfast he might sprint barefoot through the dew of waist-high poppies, dodging marauding boys from the village with slingshots round their necks. As the sun climbed higher he sought the refuge of high defiles to watch smuggler parades of camels and horses, teatime caravans swaying and clanking through the passes. Then, off to bed on the verandah of his father's hujera, the men's guest house, where he gazed up at stars so icy bright that it seemed they might pierce his skull. Pleasantly weary, he stretched out on a rope bed, eavesdropping on his father's guests and supplicants --smoky, piratical gatherings in the hujera's great room, with hubble-bubble hookahs and high-caliber bandoleers, lulling him to sleep with the streamside murmur of their mutter and growl, and the whine and hum of their radio, beaming news from the great beyond. Occasionally a burst of laughter or an angry shout shouldered into his dreams, but by morning there were only him and the muezzin beneath another clear sky.

Yet that world also had its special cloaking magic. It was a place where he learned quickly to conceal his thoughts and dreams, and from his earliest years Najeeb's elders taught him to hold in his emotions, sheathing them like a weapon.

At the age of eighteen he abruptly left that world behind, dispatched across the seas to a university in the United States. It was his father's idea, a vain stab at worldliness to impress a few haughty ministers in the government corridors of Islamabad. Najeeb went reluctantly, and for months he held himself sternly under wraps, bookish and brooding through a North Carolina winter amid airless dreams of home.

Then came the spring, and Najeeb emerged timidly from underground, sampling the bounty of bright new places that began to make home seem small, plain and crude. There were supermarkets as big as his village, libraries the size of canyons, lush trees alive with blossoms and songbirds. Then there were the women, practically naked compared to the ones he'd grown up with. They were a temptation, he knew, yet there was a holiness about them, too--as if heaven and hell had been rolled into one amazing creation of bare arms, exposed legs and lustrous heads of hair, their animated faces open to the world and all its possibilities. They soon became responsible for an altogether new kind of training in Najeeb's life. Tell us your feelings, they demanded. Share your thoughts. Having been exposed to Shakespeare in the same heady spring, Najeeb found himself torn in ways he had never anticipated. To feel or not to feel, that was the question.

And now, years after his homecoming, he was not only restless but trapped--banished from tribal lands by his father, barred from America by consular officials.

His father's action had followed a betrayal that Najeeb no longer cared to revisit. The consular ban was of a more recent vintage. The United States had decided the previous month that it no longer wanted his company, after his two worlds had collided in ways previously unimaginable in the burning skies of lower Manhattan.

So he soldiered on in Peshawar, feeling as if he'd snagged a little of himself in each place he'd departed. And as each morning's peace dissolved he often found himself brooding over what was missing, sometimes believing that he, too, was disappearing into the Peshawar haze, as indistinct as the horizon. In a country where most people defined themselves by family or faith, Najeeb found himself resorting to a more American approach, seeking identity from his various occupations. For the moment, then, he was a translator and guide, a painter of birds, an unemployed computer engineer, and, most recently, a journalist of sorts, reporting for a rambling English daily called the Frontier Report.

The few people in Peshawar who knew Najeeb well could have added further labels--disowned son, enthusiastic fornicator, occasional imbiber of forbidden beverage, habitual consorter with foreigners--tireless seeker of any path, in other words, that might lead beyond Pakistan. And at this precarious moment in the city's history, when choosing sides was the order of the day, Najeeb remained dangerously neutral.

One thing no one ever called him was lazy, and today's schedule was particularly industrious. First on the agenda: a ride on his motor scooter to the humble offices of the Frontier Report, where, as always, there would be plenty to write about. His daily task was to fashion a digest of news briefs from the tribal hinterlands of the North-West Frontier Province. It always made for strange reading--rustic feuds and oddball robberies, villages convulsed over the tiniest of matters. Perhaps someday he would collect them in a volume of curios for his friends in the United States, a Pakistani gothic that would finally help them understand what made this place tick.

The most important business of the day was scheduled for late afternoon, when Najeeb would meet yet another foreign journalist who wanted to hire him for guiding and interpreting. A fixer, the job was called, and today's client was American.

With most of the journalists so far the routine had been pretty standard. They spent their first few days doing interviews in the streets, liking the lilt of the word "bazaar" in their copy and enjoying the way every merchant invited them inside for tea. Najeeb translated while fending off hordes of curious barefoot boys and legless beggars.

If there happened to be a demonstration that day, they covered it, taking care to stay upwind from the tear gas. Then came the obligatory visit to a madrassah, one of the religious schools that supplied the Taliban with so many foot soldiers. Black-haired boys kneeling in straight lines on scrubbed marble floors, heads bobbing as they recited the Koran. Then perhaps a chant or two of "Death to America," before collecting quotes from the resident Holy Scholar.

Najeeb and his clients always shared an awkward laugh in the taxi afterward, the reporter never quite sure where Najeeb stood on these matters, and Najeeb never eager to say, not when every cabbie was a potential informant.

Then, unless there was some new wave of refugees to badger, Najeeb would escort his client east, three hours down the bouncing highway to the calm green sterility of Islamabad, to seek out bureaucrats and diplomats who might grant travel papers for the Afghan border--because Afghanistan was the ultimate goal of every client, even if the border had been closed for wee...