No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir

"A haunting memoir of disarming honesty. . . a remarkable testament to the anguish & the beauty of foreign correspondence."— Roger Cohen, New York Times Paris bureau chief & author of An Affirming Flame

From award-winning journalist Jane Ferguson, an unflinching memoir of ambition & war—from The Troubles to the fall of Kabul.

Jane Ferguson has covered nearly every war front & 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 & '90s, The Troubles meant bomb threats...