Excerpt from In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Why did she resist? To be looked after was surely exactly what she needed, but somehow it felt unbearable. As if it weren't bad enough to lose the sight in one eye, now she would lose her independence, too. She wanted to stay at a fancy hotel in New York, to smoke, to have a cocktail, to spend time with her best friend, Katrina, who would make her laugh. She needed to recover what she could of the self she had become in two decades as a journalist. It was sixteen years since she had left America. She had lived in Paris, London, and Jerusalem and had traveled to conflicts all over the world, taking chances, beating the odds, and earning her reputation as one of the toughest but most compassionate reporters in the world as well as the best and funniest company. That was who she was. She feared the waves closing over her, feared being subsumed by her family, by the cloying parochialism of her hometown, by a promise of safety that would crush her essence. However desperate her situation, she could not let herself be pulled back to where she had started.

* * *

The town of Oyster Bay, on Long Island, where Marie spent her childhood and adolescence, was quintessential suburbia. The families in the Colvins' neighborhood were America's new postwar middle class: teachers, small-business owners, government employees. This was the era when mothers stayed at home and fathers came back from work to a cigarette and a highball. They watched Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show, genial TV sitcoms about family life. It was Marie's father's claim to fame that his eldest sister, Bette, was a hostess on the quiz show Beat the Clock.

Marie, the Colvins' first child, was born on January 12, 1956, in Astoria, Queens, a restless baby who soon sprouted a head of thick, dark curls. America was changing fast. Dwight D. Eisenhower, reelected that year, was the last U.S. president born in the nineteenth century. Elvis Presley scandalized the nation with his hip thrusts as he sang "Hound Dog" on The Ed Sullivan Show. The Cold War was escalating: it was the year of the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Marie's parents had more immediate concerns—Marie's mother, Rosemarie, struggled to get her and her brother, Billy, born the following year, up and down three flights of stairs in their apartment block. Now she was expecting again. Long Island, with its beaches, fields, and potato farms, looked like a perfect solution. They found a new build in East Norwich, adjoining the more upmarket Oyster Bay. By the time Michael was born, the family was settled in the house where Marie's parents would have another two children and spend the rest of their lives.

For Rosemarie this was a huge step up in life. She had been raised in the working-class South Bronx in the lean times between the wars. Like many others in the area, her parents, James and Rose Marron, were of Irish descent. After her father died when she was just a few months old, Rosemarie's mother struggled with three children, becoming ever more religious and unyielding. Rosemarie had to work her way through Fordham Jesuit University, where she trained as a teacher. "I didn't feel I was ready for a relationship," she recollects. "I had to educate myself and had no help at home." But when she met William Colvin (six feet tall, slim, confident, with dark wavy hair), she changed her mind. "He was very kind and accepting of anything or anyone," she says. "I had grown up in a family that was dogmatic, but I wasn't that way. It was a great relief to meet someone who felt the same as I did." This, she thought, was how she would like to bring up her own children: good Catholics, disciplined and studious, but tolerant and open-minded.

The Colvins were what Rosemarie called "lace curtain Irish": middle class and relatively privileged. Although Bill's father's side was descended from Scots, they identified as Irish Catholic, and Bill had attended Saint Augustine's Catholic High School. Writing for the school newspaper made Bill dream of becoming a journalist, but in 1944, aged seventeen, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was still undergoing training when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Posted to the Chinese port city of Tientsin (now Tianjin), he and his platoon on occasion "tangled with the gooks," as he put it, when Communist units attacked U.S. forces. After he left China in September 1946 he rarely spoke about his experiences, but years later, Marie would recall marching around, aged six, singing, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli," the Marines' Hymn, which her father had taught her. It seemed, she said, "very romantic and exciting." All her life she got along well with military men. Her father had a soldierly bearing and was determined that his children uphold the high standards of behavior he had learned in the marines.

Excerpted from In Extremis by Lindsey Hilsum. Copyright © 2018 by Lindsey Hilsum. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.