Written between Double Fault and We Need to Talk About Kevin, The New Republic was completed in 1998. At that time, my sales record was poisonous. Perhaps more importantly, my American compatriots largely dismissed terrorism as Foreigners’ Boring Problem. I was unable to interest an American publisher in the manuscript.
In short order, both discouragements lifted. My sales record improved. Post-9/11, Americans became if anything too interested in terrorism. Thus for years after the calamity in New York, I was obliged to put the novel on ice, because a book that treated this issue with a light touch would have been perceived as in poor taste.
Yet the taboo seems to have run its course. Sensibilities have grown more robust. I am hopeful that this novel—whose themes have become only more trenchant since it was written—can now see print without giving offense. Though tightened with the cold eye of distance, the book is published roughly as I first wrote it, with one small, irresistible addition in the epilogue that readers will readily recognize.