2017: After postings with the UN in New York and Burundi, Mira is working for the United Nations Office at Geneva and mediates talks on the reunification of Cyprus. At a reception at the luxury hotel Beau-Rivage, she encounters Milan, with whose family she lived for a few months after her parents’ separation in 1994. Even though Milan is married with a son and is soon going to move his family to The Hague, the two begin an affair.

2012-2017: During her years of working for the UN, Mira has often asserted herself against the doubts of her superiors and was deployed to conflict areas time and again. One of her talents has helped her with that: Mira gets the most tight-lipped people to talk – generals, militiamen, important politicians who unexpectedly confide in her. During her time in war-torn Burundi, Mira covered for a general who had taken part in a massacre for months because she believed that he could be an important agent in the democratic restoration of the country. But in light of the renewed crisis the country finds itself in, her decision seems all the more unjustified. Her actions in the past could not just have ethical but also legal consequences in the present.

Rules of Engagement is told in premonitions and flashbacks from Mira’s perspective. In her masterfully crafted novel, Nora Bossong explores fundamental questions in private relationships as well as on the grand stage of politics in a clear-sighted and empathetic manner and juxtaposes the conflicts of the past with the hopes for reconciliation. What do trust and responsibility mean? In what way are protection and authority intertwined? How does testimony relate to truth? Who sits in judgement on that? And is peace a corruptible makeshift solution or something that can succeed permanently after all?

Crusade with a Dog