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Title: The Room and the Chair

Author: Lorraine Adams

Narrator: Jim McCabe

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-24-10

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 2.5 of 5 out of 9 votes

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

An astonishingly original novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lorraine Adams, author of Harbor, winner of the LA Times Book Prize.

Here are fine-drawn, empathetic portraits of the often overlooked actors of Americas infinite global war: the ridiculed night editor of a prestigious newspaper, an overburdened nuclear engineer, a duty-bound female fighter pilot, a religiously impassioned novice reporter, a sergeant major thrust into the responsibilities of a secretive command. Their longings and loyalties take us, in the course of one shattering year, from a forested city park, where child prostitutes set up business, to a Dubai hotel, where a desperate man tries to disappear; from the nighttime corridors of Walter Reed Hospital to the snow-thickened mountains of the Hindu Kush.

Told in language as stunning for its beauty as for its verisimilitude, The Room and the Chair dazzlingly bends the conventions of literary suspense to create an unforgettable, groundbreaking chronicle of today's dangerous world.

Editorial Reviews:

A good thriller is hard to find, and a solid political thriller is a rare bird indeed. This is not just a matter of coming up with enough plausible stuff to drive a plot along in a suspenseful manner, although Lorraine Adams is certainly capable on that front. As a former journalist for the Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize-winner for the investigative work she did at Dallas Morning News, Adams has a unique insight into what makes a story credible.

But more importantly and certainly more interestingly, Adams demonstrates with The Room and the Chair, just as she did with her award-winning novel Harbor, that she can get inside a characters head. The thing about Adams writing that makes it a clear cut above your run-of-the-mill political intrigue is a style of narration that portrays the free association game of logical leaps and conjectures that quick thinkers are accustomed to using to arrive at their very complicated judgments.

Jim McCabe does wonderfully acrobatic voice work in the dexterous collision of several different worlds. First we have the room, which refers to the maze of cubicles that comprise a major national newspapers editing room, a fast-paced place with which Adams is intensely familiar. The purpose of the room is to uncover what the chair is covering up. The chair is the leader of a covert federal agency responsible for an assortment of operations in the Middle East, a geopolitical landscape in this case involving two particularly human stories. One of those stories traces the career of an Air Force pilot who survived the mysterious crash of her aircraft over friendly territory. The other story traces the faked death and subsequent escape plans of an Iranian nuclear scientist.

Inside the heads of managing editors, their adulterous columnist wives, an assortment of clandestine operations agents and a few military personnel resides a deep well of calculation and psychological misgivings. McCabe captures each of these with a nuanced understanding of the survivalist mentality that those in such a political arena must possess. The story itself is a satisfying tale of the perils of waging war, but the real treasure both in the writing and in the listening is a hotbed of emotional speculation that lives inside each character to drive the story onward.