No Ordinary Assignment

A haunting memoir of disarming honesty... a remarkable testament to the anguish and the beauty of foreign correspondence. ' Roger Cohen, New York Times Paris bureau chief and author of An Affirming Flame From award-winning journalist Jane Ferguson, an unflinching memoir of ambition and war from The Troubles to the fall of Kabul. Jane Ferguson has covered nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into the Arab Spring, she secured rare access to rebel-held Syria, where foreign journalists were banned, to cover its civil war. When the Taliban claimed Kabul in 2021, she was one of the last Western journalists to remain at the airport as thousands of Afghans, including some of her colleagues, struggled to evacuate. Living with sectarian violence was nothing new to Ferguson. As a child in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and 90s, The Troubles meant bomb threats and military checkpoints on the way to school were commonplace. Books by Dervla Murphy and Martha Gellhorn offered solace from her turbulent family, and an opportunity to study Arabic in Yemen came as a relief and a ticket to the life in journalism she imagined. Without family wealth or connections, she began as a scrappy one-woman reporting team, a borrowed camera often her only equipment. Networks told her she had the wrong accent, the wrong.