Book Club Meeting

No Ordinary Assignment: A Memoir, by Jane Ferguson

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.Ferguson’s bold debut chronicles her unlikely journey from bright, inquisitive child to intrepid war correspondent. With an open-hearted humanity, we rarely see in conflict stories, No Ordinary Assignment shows what it means to build an authentic career against the odds.