An Expensive Education

- Blurb -

A remarkable new novel from Nick McDonell, "An Expensive Education" cuts between the African bush and Harvard - taking its readers deep inside this iconic university and the inner workings of the American intelligence service. Professor Susan Lowell has it made. A happily married mother of two in a tenure-track job at Harvard, she has just won a Pulitzer Prize for her book lionizing Hatashil, an East African freedom fighter. David Ayan is her singular Somali-born student. He is trying to become a member of one of Harvard's elite finals clubs. He is trying to understand Jane, his girlfriend from a privileged background. He is trying, sometimes, just to get by in a foreign place. Michael Teak is a twenty-five-year-old Harvard graduate working as an American intelligence operative who meets Hatashil in David's homestead, minutes before the massacre that will upend all their lives. Moving from a decimated Somalian village to Harvard's dormitories, drinking holes and exclusive fraternities, "An Expensive Education" is a powerful portrait of personalities ensnared in the African conflict, and of the troubled intersection of ivory-tower academia and realpolitik.