Beginning  life on-line, this novel  has since become a computer game and European sensation. It is not surprising that the author is in discussion with Hollywood-based studios about a film version. Like “The Millennium Trilogy”, albeit much darker, Metro 2033 catches the Zeitgeist.

Not usually a fan of this genre, I can thoroughly recommend this book.

Smith’s story is ostensibly about the death of former model, and now international development activist, Aisha Lincoln in the Lebanon, when she is critically injured in a land mine explosion. A young freelance “celebrity” journalist called Amanda has been covering Aisha’s life, and, afet her death, travels to the Lebanon to find out more about how she died.

Amanda’s epiphany occurs shortly after she arrives in Beirut. Her escort in the city, a Swedish freelance called Ingrid, takes Amanda to a local market : “When they reached the last stall, she saw that the dilapidated buildings extended for miles, marking the beginning of what looked like a vast slum”. This “vast slum” turns out to have developed from a refugee camp, about which Ingrid is making a film.

As Aisha’s story starts to unfold for Amanda, so does that of the Lebanon between the early 1980s and 1996-7. This is the year in which the novel’s main action is set and it also deals deftly with the British political scene in the anticipated, and then actual, demise of a long-running Conservative government, the coming into power of New Labour, and the subsequent tragic death of Princess Diana.

This convergence of events ultimately makes it difficult for Amanda to obtain the media coverage both for Aisha’s story and that of the Lebanon, which she now knows they deserve. “What Will Survive” – which itself cleverly usages “reportage” to unfold events – is not only a very good story well-told, but also a commentary on British and international media values of the recent past.