San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Love in the time of espionage
Local writer Amanda Matti pens a political thriller with a romantic twist
For as long as the written word has existed, readers have had an insatiable appetite for stories about love defying the odds. When it comes to fiction, the market isn’t exactly hard-pressed for a story about forbidden romance. Amanda Matti is well aware of this fact. Still, the local writer and Navy veteran probably never would have written her new thriller, “New Dawn Underground,” had she not experienced something of a forbidden romance herself. “Of course, the first rule of fiction is to write what you know,” Matti says from her home in El Cajon. “So that’s kind of what I did.”
This concept of writing “what you know,” an expression commonly attributed to Mark Twain, should still only be seen as planting the seeds for “New Dawn Underground.” Just as the protagonist of “New Dawn Underground” works as a CIA analyst, so did Matti work as an intel analyst for the Navy and NSA. And just as the book’s analyst becomes enamored of an Iraqi man while posing as a journalist, so did Matti when she met Fadi Matti, an Iraqi translator who would later become her husband.
However, Matti is quick to point out that when it comes to her and the heroine of “New Dawn Underground,” the comparisons between fiction and reality end there.
“Of course it’s influenced by my real-life story,” says Matti, who wrote about her own romance with Fadi and the subsequent fallout in her 2016 memoir, “A Foreign Affair.” “When my husband and I first got together and people found out, a lot of them were like, ‘You’re marrying a guy from Iraq? What if he’s a terrorist?’ and all this crazy stuff. Of course, he’s not, but that’s where the premise came from.”
“New Dawn Underground” is Matti’s first foray into fiction, and while the book could be seen as a standard espionage thriller about a CIA analyst attempting to infiltrate an Iraqi insurgent group, its romantic angle is one that is unique to the genre. Even more compelling is that the book’s hero, CIA analyst Elora Monro, ends up becoming romantically entangled with Zaidan Al-sadiq, the righthand man of the very Iraqi insurgent who killed her fiancé.
“I always come back to that Maya Angelou quote, ‘Write the
“New Dawn Underground” by Amanda Matti
(Reese & Rayne Publishing, 2020; 450 pages) book you want to read,’ ” says Matti, who grew up in Florida before joining the Navy right out of high school. “And I couldn’t help but think there’s nothing really out there like it. It’s got everything. I didn’t just want to write a romance novel or a political thriller. I wanted to write something that was real, but also had action, political intrigue and romance, and has crazy twists and turns along the way.”
The romance angle alone could be seen as dangerous territory for a writer attempting to break into the thriller genre. That is, bookworms may very well be ready for a thriller about a CIA agent attempting to infiltrate a shadowy insurgency, but even the most progressive of readers may feel troubled by the idea of an American agent falling in love with the enemy.
“I didn’t think a lot of burly men would be reading this,” says Matti, laughing. “It was written for people like me — women who have served or have been in the political sphere and who are looking for intelligent political thrillers with a human side.”
“The political thrillers these days are all action and politics,” Matti continues. “But there’s a lot of human emotion beneath the surface of politics that are not written about. These are real people who have emotions and these emotions do influence them.”
Matti’s previous two n onfiction books — “A Foreign Affair” and 2017’s “Voicing the Eagle” about her husband’s experiences working as a translator for American forces in Iraq — attempted to convey this emotion beneath the surface, albeit in a personal manner. Both books were meant to explore misconceptions people often have when it comes to different cultures, even ones that could be considered the enemy. She extended this outlook when it came down to writing “New Dawn Underground.”
“It’s another book where I’m trying to explain to people that both sides can actually have their eyes opened,” Matti says. “In this book, and of course in my real-life story, I learned a lot from my husband, and he learned a lot from me. It’s important for people to confront their misconceptions and be open to understanding that they might not have the full story. They might not know everything.”
And while Matti concedes that the book is a thriller at its core, it could also be seen as a book about cultural awakenings — of finding the commonalities in all of humanity and even with those who seem the least likely to reach us.
“It speaks to the very real issues and happenings when it comes to geopolitical conflicts, especially in the Middle East,” Matti says. “But it’s about having blinders on and then something large happening and then, all of a sudden, those blinders are removed and everything you thought you knew is upside down.”