Product Description

In Dublin, a newspaper editor called Cartwright is found dead. One of his colleagues, Owen Simmons, discovers a dossier on Cartwright’s desk. And in the dossier Owen finds a photograph, which brings him back to a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved. Not Untrue and Not Unkind is Owen’s story – a gripping story of friendship, rivalry and betrayal amongst a group of journalists and photographers covering Africa’s wars. It is an astonishingly powerful and accomplished debut that immediately establishes Ed O'Loughlin as a mature master of the novel form.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10089 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Review
'Fantastic writing ... the most exciting first novel I have read in many years' --Anne Enright

'Leaves a deep impression ... vibrant but restrained prose'
--Metro

Review
'A fine, darkly authoritative'

Review
'One of the most powerful debut Irish novels of the last decade'

Customer Reviews

A journalist comes of age

A wonderfully authentic novel set in the morally muddled world of foreign correspondents covering Africa. Not sure this man O'Loughlin has written a book before but he surely must again. Not Untrue and Not Unkind takes us from the spume-flecked breakwaters protecting the port of Dublin to the chaos of African conflict on a journey of private discovery. It is much more than a journalists' tale, touching on the ambition, vanity, guilt and anger that drives us all.
A chance discovery in the drawer of dead newspaper colleague, the sort of man who never travels beyond the office but whose fearsome reputation terrifies reporters around the globe, of a private file reopens old wounds. It takes us back to the start of a reporter's career when the job was all about principle and ideals. But as Owen Simmons flies into his first African story - the post-Rwandan mess in the eastern Congo - he is forced to make compromises.
This is a book written with great authority - not least because O'Loughlin worked Africa in the 1990s as a reporter. We learn what snacks foreign correspondents subsist on in the developing world (cheese and onion Pringles, no less) and how satellite phones have brought stark immediacy where reporters once had time to cogitate and compose.
But it is also written with beauty and poise that does justice not just to the African landscape where it is set but to anyone who has ever dreamt of making a difference.
Buy this book. You won't be disappointed.

Extraordinary
I'm not sure I'd have read this had it not been for the Booker longlisting, as I found the jacket drab and the title didn't grab me (it turns out to be a quote from a Philip Larkin poem). But I found this a quite astonishing first novel - as accomplished a book as you'd expect from any of the writers with whom he shares the Booker Prize longlist. Since I finished it I can't stop thinking of Owen Simmons, and the team of cynical, war-weary foreign correspondents with whom he chases conflict in late 1990s Africa. The book is dark and furious; there's no redemptive happy ending, no heroics (at least, when people act like heroes, it's usually from distinctly unheroic motives), and the African conflict is an integral part of the narrative, and not just the backdrop for the lives of glamorous Europeans. It's as complex and messy as the country it describes, shot through with mordant humour, and written in the most beautiful prose. Not an easy read, but a rewarding one that will stay with you for a long time.

Beautifully written, haunting novel
This is a wonderful novel, beautifully written and it more than deserves its Booker nomination. It is the story of a journalist who is compelled by an unexpected death to confront the past and his story and those stories which he tells will haunt the reader long after the novel ends. It is also a fascinating insight into the world of the foreign correspondent and will change the way you view the news forever.