[close] From the author of the best-selling, universally acclaimed The People’s Act of Love comes the incisive and timeless story of a globe-trotting journalist’s perils in the pursuit of love, set against the war zones and dinner parties of today’s discordant and bewildering world stage.

The world around journalist and would-be novelist Adam Kellas is cracking. As a war correspondent in the Afghan mountains during post-9/11 operations, Kellas reports on prescheduled surgical strikes with a nagging sense of complicity. At dinner parties in chic North London, he uneasily joins the debate of the wars from the comfort of their immaculate dinner tables. Divorced, unstable, spurned by his lover and publishing houses from Paris to New York, Kellas embarks on a strange and difficult journey that will lead him to a tiny rural town near the Chesapeake Bay. There, the elusive American reporter Astrid, with whom Kellas shared one passionate night, waits for him, holding a glimmer of hope for Kellas’ life but also an unsettling secret.

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent spans continents, cultures, and classes, brilliantly weaving together the hypocrisies, foibles, and passions of the way we live now. [close]