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Phoebe Greenwood
Vulture

It’s November 2012. Sara Byrne, an entitled, overweight freelance journalist with daddy issues, is reporting on Israel’s eight-day war with Hamas for The Tribune from the Beach Hotel in Gaza City. There is nothing she won’t do to keep her byline on the paper’s front page – except learn Arabic or summon even an iota of empathy for the shattered lives she is covering. She loathes her fixers for failing to secure access to terrorist tunnels and treats everyone in Gaza, from her fellow correspondents to hotel staff and her interviewees, with general disdain.

Phoebe Greenwood’s Vulture is an acerbic, irreverent and pitch-black satire on the moral bankruptcy of a news industry that churns through human suffering for profit and the soulless journalists who will do anything for a bigger, better byline. In snippets, the novel is outrageously, laugh-out-loud funny – the driver, for example, who lies down “like a fat concubine”. Some jokes are icky (she looks like “Gaddafi in a sauna” in the heat), others shocking (she would “sooner take Somalian famine death” than move back in with her mother). But as the story develops, the shock factor of Byrne’s narcissistic Millennial fuming fades and her odiousness becomes exasperating.

Spliced through her gruesome reporting are snapshots of her dysfunctional life in London, where she sleeps with an older man while his wife undergoes cancer treatment. The sudden shifts between the horrors of war and the nihilism of a bored Millennial are jarring. But hey, as Byrne quips, “Life is war.” As she files from Gaza, the journalist descends into a hallucinatory episode involving very bad sex with a hairy Italian, apocalyptic herpes and a Latin-speaking pigeon. It’s over the top, matching Greenwood’s crass writing. Her adjectives are obvious (“nicotiney smoke”). Israeli drones in the night sky are “psycho robot cicadas”. Jerusalem, meanwhile, “looked like a council estate on a space station”.

There are moments, too brief, where Byrne attempts to recognise the humanity of the Gazan people, the “middle-aged men calmly sweeping up their exploded lives”. These glimpses into the faith and endurance that hold these Gazan lives together as their home is destroyed are reminders this novel is set in a region of the world languishing in immense suffering.

With Vulture, the former Middle East correspondent drums up visceral hatred for the war journalists who “make a living from death and disaster”. Maybe this was Greenwood’s point with this Millennial Scoop, but like her character Byrne, her satire doesn’t quite justify profiteering off wholesale suffering.

Europa, 300pp, $34.99

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 22, 2025 as "Vulture".

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