The Internationals Paperback

Sarah May is one of England's most promising young novelists.

Her first novel was on the list for the Guardian First Novel Award, her second won her an Amazon Writer's Bursary.

The Internationals could well be her breakout book Set in and around a Macedonian refugee camp during the 1999 war in Kosova, Sarah May's brilliantly satirical third novel brings together an extraordinary cast of Western aid workers and journalists, Macedonian dreamers and Albanian schemers.

The story begins with the NATO airstrikes, when the spotlight of the world's news media suddenly turns on a small, landlocked country struggling to turn itself into a modern Capitalist state, and ends with the Serbian withdrawal from Kosova.

In the intervening nine days of mounting tension and soaring temperatures, the so-called Internationals - those who believe that they can only lead 'real' lives in countries less fortunate than their own - attempt to impose their flimsy solutions.

Yet the strange complexities of the Macedonian and Albanian communities are destined to remain always just beyond their grasp. Exestate agents from English suburbia, Italian feminists and Australian engineers become entangled with arms smugglers, advertising executives and an Albanian mayor whose overwhelming ambition is to own a four-wheel drive.

As the days pass and the Internationals each jettison more and more of the certainties they came with, they gradually begin to understand that their motives are really no purer than those they believe corrupt.

The Independent on Sunday said of Sarah May's second novel, Spanish City, it 'should be read by whoever said a good novel could not be written by a writer under 30'.

Ambitious, funny, clever and highly topical, The Internationals proves that, after 30, it only gets better.