Literary Fiction Political

Prague in the 1950s is a city of numerous small terrors, of political tyranny, corruption, and surveillance. There is no way of knowing whether one's neighbor is spying for the government, or what one's supposed friend will say under pressure to a state security agent. A loyal party member might be imprisoned or executed as quickly as a traitor; innocence means nothing for a person caught in a government trap.

Samuel has lived alone on an island off the coast of an unnamed African country for more than two decades. He tends to his garden, his lighthouse, and his chickens, content with a solitary life. Routinely, the nameless bodies of refugees wash ashore, but Samuel—who understands that the government only values certain lives, certain deaths—always buries them himself. One day, though, he finds that one of these bodies is still breathing.

For years, Amira—a recent convert to Islam living in Rome—has gone to work, said her prayers, and struggled to piece together her husband’s redacted letters from the Moroccan black site where he is imprisoned. She moves as inconspicuously as possible through her modest life, doing her best to avoid the whispered curiosity of her community.

First published in 1880, The Rebecca Rioter is a novel based on the notorious Rebecca Riots in South and West Wales in the early 19th century. The story tells the tale of Evan Williams, a young working-class man, struggling to come to terms with the injustice and social inequalities of the world he lives in. His rebellious actions during a time of "agrarian discontent" have dramatic consequences, not only for himself, but also inadvertently for the woman he loves. Amy Dillwyn (1845-1935) was born in Swansea and was a novelist, feminist, and pioneer industrialist.

Set at the turn of the 21st century in China along the Tumen River, which separates northeast China and North Korea, The Ginseng Hunter follows the daily life of a Chinese ginseng hunter, who lives alone in the valley, spending his days up in the mountains looking for ginseng and preparing for winter. He is little aware of the world outside until shadowy figures hiding in the fields, bodies floating in the river, and rumors of thievery and murder begin to intrude on his cherished solitude.

Blood Republic is a political-thriller for a divided modern America. Corrupt politicians, biased media, NSA surveillance, and viral hate; Blood Republic examines extremism through a heart-pumping thriller with the fate of the country at stake. Will America survive its next election or collapse into a second civil war of conservative versus liberal?

A rural working-class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this inspired novel for our times - fiction in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan. Here are the dramas of 21st-century America - rising inequality, working class decline, a new authoritarianism - played out in the classic setting of some of our greatest novels: the small town. The Locals is that rare work of fiction capable of capturing a fraught American moment in real time.

In Canberra, a federal election looms and Cassius Calvert, Minister for Border Integrity, is facing a new hard-line policy regarding asylum-seekers. Off the Indonesian island of Dana, Isi Natoli, skipper of the Java Ridge, and a group of Australian surf tourists are anchored beside an idyllic reef. A few kilometres away, Roya and her mother are amongst the passengers fleeing persecution aboard the Talakar. When a storm breaks, these stories collide with chilling consequences....

ín Chaparro is a retired detective still obsessed by the brutal, decades-old rape and murder of a young married woman in her own bedroom. While attempting to write a book about the case, he revisits the details of the investigation. As he reaches into the past, Chaparro also recalls the beginning of his long, unrequited love for Irene Hornos, then just an intern, now a respected judge. Set in the Buenos Aires of the 1970s, Sacheri’s tale reveals the underpinnings of Argentina’s Dirty War and takes on the question of justice - what it really means and in whose hands it belongs.

Here are fine-drawn, empathetic portraits of the often overlooked actors of America’s infinite global war: the ridiculed night editor of a prestigious newspaper, an overburdened nuclear engineer, a duty-bound female fighter pilot, a religiously impassioned novice reporter, a sergeant major thrust into the responsibilities of a secretive command. Their longings and loyalties take us, in the course of one shattering year. Told in language as stunning for its beauty as for its verisimilitude, The Room and the Chair dazzlingly bends the conventions of literary suspense .

In rural Turkey, Meryem is raped by her uncle. Outcast for shaming her family, she is expected to kill herself. Her commando cousin instead tells her he will take her to Istanbul. By chance, they meet Irfan, a celebrity professor who has left his wife, and the three embark on a journey that shows what unexpected things can happen in the space between wounded people.

The novel takes us both forward and back in time, creating a panoramic view of the family’s history: from Alexander’s grandparents’ return to the GDR to build the socialist state, to his father’s decade spent in a gulag for criticizing the Soviet regime, to his son’s desire to leave the political struggles of the twentieth century in the past.

The United States is on the brink of war. It's August, 2023, and political unrest is sweeping the nation. Banking giant Citi-Chase-Capitol-Morgan has bought out the government, the Internet is censored, and hardcore conservatives have joined the New Secession Coalition. It is a dark time for America. However, somewhere in the Mojave Desert, once voice has dared to stand up to corruption. His name is John Herald.

When the celebrated Russian-born architect Roman Guttman is injured in a bus bombing, his perceptions become heightened and disturbed, leading him on an ill-advised journey into Palestinian territory. His odyssey alternates with the bittersweet diary of his teenage daughter Anyusha - on her own perilous path - and the startlingly alive observations of Amir, the young Palestinian who pushed the button and is now damned to watch the havoc he has wrought from a shaky beyond.

The tumultuous presidential campaign of Thomas Crane, a charismatic but elusive senator from the midwest, presents reporter Cliff O'Connell with a career-making opportunity. Originally given little chance to succeed, Crane's dark-horse candidacy suddenly takes off, and O'Connell is on the inside, traveling with the candidate across America. But O'Connell is caught in a brutal triangle, torn between personal and political passions and his commitment to the truth.

Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, The Angel of History follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. This is a profound, philosophical, and hilariously winning story of the war between memory and oblivion we wrestle with every day of our lives.

Ascension is a political coming-of-age story that captures the energy and fun of a down-to-the-wire election.

In 1995 Ben Jones is a fifth-year senior at East Central Louisiana University in Ascension, Louisiana. While trying to graduate from college, he naively runs for the legislature to fill a government-studies requirement. But Ben still doesn't know what he wants to do with his life.

Meticulously researched, and superbly imagined, The Commoner is the mesmerizing, moving, and surprising story of a brutally rarefied and controlled existence, at once hidden and exposed, and of a complex relationship between two isolated women who, despite being visible to all, are truly understood only by each other.

In the twilight years of Communist East Germany, Bruno Krug, author of a single world-famous novel written twenty years earlier, falls for Theresa Aden, a music student from the West. But Theresa has also caught the eye of a cocky young scriptwriter who delights in satirizing Krug’s work. Asked to appraise a mysterious manuscript, Bruno is disturbed to find that the author is none other than his rival. Disconcertingly, the book is good—very good.

One spring afternoon, Vincent Nolan, a young neo-Nazi walks into the office of a human rights foundation headed by Meyer Maslow, a charismatic Holocaust survivor. Vincent announces that he wants to make a radical change. But what is Maslow to make of this rough-looking stranger with Waffen SS tattoos who says that his mission is to save guys like him from becoming guys like him?