Forgive Me
By Amanda Eyre Ward
(Random House, $24)
Nadine Morgan is a fictional journalist created by Amanda Eyre Ward for her novel Forgive Me. Thousands of novels feature a journalist as their protagonist. Many of these fictional scribes are forgettable - they serve as the engine that drives the plot, but they never seem alive, let alone realistic. Ward's Morgan, however, seems very much alive and, for the most part, realistic. In her mid-30s, she travels the world as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines, seeking out dangerous stories in dangerous places, from Mexico to Haiti to India to South Africa.

Morgan lost her mother at a young age and has minimal contact with her father, who is employed at a fish market on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. It seems she is always running toward stories while simultaneously running away from family, friends, and the possibility of any romance that could lead to marriage and children. In South Africa, when she was a young journalist, Morgan fell in love with a photographer. But when he died on assignment, she became even more peripatetic, even more wary of personal commitments.

Forgive Me opens in Mexico, where Morgan is beaten almost to death while on assignment. Against her will, she ends up back in Massachusetts, under the care of her father and his well-intentioned but overbearing female friend. The doctor caring for Morgan is a pleasant person who falls in love with his temporary patient. Though Morgan feels comfortable with him, she bolts for South Africa without telling him when she learns about an unfinished story there that she wants to write.

The majority of the novel is set in South Africa during the racial violence of the 1980s and during the start of the nation's healing in the 1990s. A couple of subplots are difficult to follow because of an irregularly recurring diary device used by Ward, an Austin writer who has published two previous novels. But the novel's positives far outweigh its negatives. Not the least of those positives is the refreshingly accurate portrayal of a journalist. - Steve Weinberg