Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar: A piercing look at journalism, grief, and the stories we choose not to tell

The most unsettling part of Midnight, at the War by Devi S. Laskar isn’t the violence—it’s everything that gets ignored in its wake. Releasing April 14, 2026, this literary novel follows foreign correspondent Rita Das as she chases the biggest story of her career in a war-torn Middle East, all while quietly unraveling under the weight of grief, guilt, and a life she refuses to apologize for.

Rita is not an easy protagonist to pin down, and that’s precisely what makes her compelling. She is fiercely independent, deeply ambitious, and committed to living life on her own terms—even when those choices isolate her from nearly everyone around her. The double standard is impossible to ignore: if Rita were a man, her career-first mindset and emotional detachment would be praised. Instead, she’s judged at every turn, with only her late mother—a doctor who lived similarly on her own terms—offering any real understanding. That absence lingers, because grief is one of the novel’s most persistent undercurrents.

And yet, Rita refuses to sit with that grief. She loses people to illness, to violence, to the slow erosion of relationships, but she never allows herself the space to process any of it. Instead, she throws herself deeper into her work, into “the war”—a deliberately unspecified conflict that stands in for countless real ones across the Middle East over the past several decades. That choice by Laskar feels intentional and effective. This isn’t just one war; it’s all of them. It’s the cyclical, ongoing reality of conflict that continues regardless of where the headlines happen to land.

The novel’s timeline, straddling the events of 9/11, adds another layer of complexity. Laskar explores the shift in U.S. American media that followed—the gradual erosion of journalistic objectivity as reporting becomes more reliant on official narratives from the government and law enforcement. There’s a quiet but unmistakable argument here: that the ripple effects of those attacks reshaped not only global politics, but also the way truth itself is constructed and delivered to the public. In some ways, the book suggests, the long-term consequences of that shift are still unfolding—and not in our favor.

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What makes Midnight, at the War particularly powerful is its attention to the stories that don’t make the front page. The missing women and girls. The famine and displacement driven by climate change. The refugees whose lives are reduced to statistics, if they’re acknowledged at all. These threads run beneath Rita’s reporting, creating a tension between the stories she’s assigned to tell and the ones she knows matter just as much—if not more. It raises an uncomfortable question: what does it mean to bear witness if the world only listens selectively?

Laskar’s prose leans literary, favoring introspection over momentum, and the result is a novel that feels heavy in the best and most intentional way. This isn’t a fast-paced war story or a tidy character arc. It’s a meditation on moral ambiguity, on the cost of ambition, and on the emotional toll of refusing to confront your own life while documenting everyone else’s.

This is not a book you pick up for escapism. It demands attention, patience, and a willingness to sit with discomfort. But for readers open to that experience, Midnight, at the War offers something far more lasting: a stark, thoughtful examination of the world as it is—and a warning about where it might be heading.

Do you think stories like Rita’s still get told in today’s media landscape, or have they been pushed even further to the margins? Share your thoughts in the comments.

An advance reader copy of this book (ARC) was provided to me by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Related Content

• Ten Questions with Devi S. Laskar (Raising Mothers)
• A conversation with Devi Laskar (fauxmoir lit mag)
• Devi S. Laskar: Author Spotlight (Writer’s Digest)
• Process Note #64 : Devi S. Laskar (periodicities)

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