Summary

Correspondents begins with a prologue set at the Mahrajan, a festival of Lebanese culture, on labor day weekend 2008. Rita Khoury travels home to Lawton, Massachusetts with her boyfriend Jonah to attend the festival. Rita is part of a large half Irish, half Lebanese family and has spent some time in Iraq as a war correspondent. Jonah, her Jewish boyfriend, meets her family for the first time in the prologue. Murphy introduces readers to key members of the Khoury family, including Ally, Rita’s older sister, Mary Jo, Rita’s mother, and Bobby, Rita’s cousin who lost a leg in Iraq. At the end of the prologue, as Rita and her family dance the dabke, a traditional Middle Eastern dance, Rita sees a man heading for the group with a dark object in his hands. “Then she identified the object in his...