The Canal House
Daniel McFarland has refined the life of a war correspondent down to an art. He knows how to get information out of officials who won't talk. He knows how to find the one man with a car who can get you out of town. He knows how to judge the gravity of a situation in a war-torn area (it's a bad sign when the dogs are gone). And he knows how to get to the heart of an explosive story and emerge unscathed. To Daniel, getting the story is everything. When a trip to a warlord's camp in Uganda goes awry and Daniel's companions end up dead, he has his first serious moment of reckoning with his lack of faith, his steely approach to life, and his cool dispatch of the people around him. And as he falls in love with Julia Cadell, an idealistic doctor, he begins to see the world anew. The two run off together to a canal house in the middle of London, where they find a refuge from their perilous lives. But they can't ignore the real world forever and are soon persuaded to travel to East Timor, where the entire nation has become a war zone. As the militia prepares to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of refugees, Daniel must decide whether to get the story of a lifetime or to see beyond the headlines to the people whose lives are in the balance. "This touching, elegantly written tale aptly describes love and friendship amid the terror of contemporary war." --The Dallas Morning News
Mark Lee
Mark W. Lee is an American novelist, poet and playwright. He has worked as a war correspondent and some of these real-life experiences appear in The Canal House. Lee was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He attended Yale University where he became friends with the Pulitzer prize winning poet and novelist, Robert Penn Warren. Lee dedicated his first novel,The Lost Tribe, to Warren. After graduating from Yale, Lee lived in New York City for several years where he worked as a taxi driver and security guard. His poetry and nonfiction appeared in theAtlantic Monthly, the Times Literary Supplement and a variety of literary journals. In the1980s, Lee traveled to East Africa where he worked as a foreign correspondent for theLondon Daily Telegraph. During the brutal civil war that followed the fall of dictator Idi Amin, he was one of the few western journalists living in Uganda. Reporting on the poaching of elephants on the northern Ugandan border, Lee was almost killed by Sudanese soldiers. After being expelled from Uganda for writing about military atrocities, Lee returned to the United States. He found that he could no longer write poetry and began writing plays and novels. In 2000, Lee traveled to East Timor and wrote articles about the civil war for theAtlantic Monthly and Los Angeles Times. The UN invasion of the small island nation is described in The Canal House. Mark Lee’s work also appears inPolitically Inspired a collection of essays about the Iraq war. In Publisher’s Weekly, the reviewer wrote: Lee's Memo to Our Journalists is a short, punchy list of editorial precautions to reporters in Iraq. It includes such pithy advice as: "If you and your embedded unit are lost in the countryside and searching for the main road, remember that every adult male in the world lies about most things much of the time. Look for a smart, honest nine-year-old."
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