Literary Fiction Political

Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, the year in which much of this bitterly funny novel is set, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam.

With a nod to Samuel Beckett and Bohumil Hrabal, a young dramatist from a West African nation describes a student protest against a brutal oligarchy and its crushing aftermath. While distributing leaflets with provocative quotations from Beckett, Ito Baraka is taken to a camp where torture, starvation, beatings, and rape are normal. Forced to inform on his friends, whose fates he now fears, and released a broken man, he is enabled to escape to Quebec. His one goal is to tell the story of the protest and pay homage to Koli Lem, a teacher, cellmate, and lover of books....

Brave and bold, this gorgeously written novel introduces a large cast of characters from various backgrounds in a setting where violence is routine and where survival is defined by boundaries, walls, and checkpoints that force people to live and love within and across them. Hamid, a college student, has entered Israeli territory illegally for work. Rushing past soldiers, he bumps into Vera, a German journalist headed to Jerusalem to cover the story of Salem, a Palestinian boy beaten into a coma by a group of revenge-seeking Israeli teenagers.

Marisol vanished during the Cuban Revolution, disappearing with hardly a trace. Now, shaped by atrocities long-forgotten, her foul-mouthed spirit visits her nephew, Ramon, in modern-day New Jersey. Her hope: That her presence will prompt him to unearth their painful family history. Ramon launches a haphazard investigation into the story of his ancestor, unaware of the forces driving him on his search. Along the way, he falls in love, faces a run-in with a murderous gangster, and uncovers the lives of the lost saints who helped Marisol during her imprisonment.

Abbey Mei Otis's short stories are contemporary fiction at its strongest: taking apart the supposed equality that is clearly just not there, putting humans under an alien microscope, putting humans under government control, and more. Otis has long been fascinated in using strange situations to explore dynamics of power, oppression, and grief, and the 12 stories collected here are at once a striking indictment of the present and a powerful warning about the future.

When Ferron Morgan's father dies in suspicious circumstances, his trauma is exacerbated by the conflict within his family and among his father's friends over whether the death was the result of medical negligence or if it was a political assassination. Ferron grew up in awe of his father's radical political endeavors, but in later years he watched as the resurgence of the political right in the Caribbean in the 1980s robbed the man of his faith.

"If you, too, feel like wandering, come along and help me unravel this odd tale - a tale full of half-truths, whole-truths, and no-truths at all." So begins Frank Capra's never published, and often speculated about novel of his favorite place - Silver Lake, nestled in the jagged cliffs of the eastern Sierra Nevadas. Capra casts the fictional Frank Capra in the lead roll of this novel of environmental and humanitarian preservation.

As the 1980s draw to a close, South Africa is a maelstrom of political violence with the apartheid regime in its death throes. Young Martin Helger is the struggling odd duck at an elite private boys school in Johannesburg, with his father, a rough-handed scrap dealer, and his brother, a mysterious legend. When a beautiful and manipulative American arrives at the family home, Martin soon finds himself wrenched out of his isolated bubble and thrust into the raw heart of the struggle.

Paris Metro is the gripping story of an American journalist compelled to reexamine her convictions as terrorism threatens to engulf her family. It's 2015, and Kit is living in Paris, estranged from her Iraqi diplomat husband and raising their teenage son, Ahmed. When Charlie Hebdo is attacked and a cartoonist friend of hers is killed, and then terrorists storm the Bataclan, Kit's Parisian world is shattered. As she is drawn back into reporting, she begins to suspect that Ahmed may be running with the terrorists.

Set against a backdrop of the current political and cultural upheaval in the US and Eastern Europe, The Unmade World is a thoughtful, scope-y literary novel with a dose of suspense that moves from Poland to California to the Hudson Valley and back to Poland. It covers a decade in the lives of an American journalist and a Polish small businessman turned petty criminal and the wrenching aftermath of an accidental, tragic encounter between these two on a snowy night in 2006 on the outskirts of Krakow. The accident costs the lives of the American journalist Richard Brennan's wife and daughter, an event that colors the rest of his life. It also leads to a downward spiral for Bogdan Baranowsk, leaving emotional scars as he suffers the seemingly inevitable loss of his business, his home, and his wife.

In an age of NSA spying and unprecedented government oversight, young Alan Stewart wants nothing to do with change - that is until he is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit, and forced to face reality. Consumerism, passivity, apathy, and distraction. The internet is no place to attempt changing anything that matters. A young Scottish drifter, Alan Stewart, struggles to come of age in a world he knows only through the World Wide Web. But come of age he does, learning something of truth and the price of freedom along the way.

During the scorching hot summer of 1988, Michael Dukakis leads George Bush senior in the polls. And while political conventions and campaigns continue to be in session, Hawk and the rest of the "button gang" sell their buttons first to Democrats in Atlanta, then Republicans in New Orleans. As always, the gang sells to either side of any persuasion, offering a unique underview of the American political process, amoral hucksterism, and a corrupted form of capitalism.

Love for another person. Love for humanity as a whole. Are the two compatible or mutually exclusive? In Andrei Makine's most daring and ambitious novel since Dreams of My Russian Summers, in the midst of an insane African war somwehtere along the border between Angola and Zaire, two young people--Elias Almeida, a black revolutionary, and Anna, a Russian student--will struggle to stay together while forces beyond them work to tear them apart.

Moses longs for something outside the grim existence he has known. He and his friend Kioso hitch a ride out of the city on the back of a truck, only to find themselves in the wilderness where their street wisdom no longer helps them as they encounter poisonous snakes, cruel jungle travelers, and a brutal shoot-out with elephant poachers.

Ben has just returned from a war waged against a nameless enemy. To avoid being nabbed by police and forced to work in a factory, he’ll need to find a wife. But to do that, he must wear a bachelor’s suit—and the tailor won’t make one for him.

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.

A community of Black faith healers witness an event that will change their lives forever in this novel set in a fictional city in the American South. Though they all united in their search for the healing properties of salt, some of them are centered, some are off-balance; some are frightened, and some are daring. From the men who live off welfare women to the mud mothers who carry their children in their hides, the novel brilliantly explores the narcissistic aspect of despair and the tremendous responsibility that comes with physical, spiritual, and mental well-being.

A tense and nerve-shattering classic from the highly acclaimed master of action and suspense. A rolling for Knox. is how the journalists describe the Presidential motorcade as it enters San Francisco across the Golden Gate. Even the ever-watchful FBI believe it is impregnable - as it has to be with the President and two Arab potentates aboard. But halfway across the bridge the unthinkable happens. Before the eyes of the world a master criminal pulls off the most spectacular kidnapping in modern times....

In the midst of the Japanese occupation of China and Hong Kong, two lives become intertwined: Wong Chia Chi, a young student active in the resistance, and Mr. Yee, a powerful political figure who works for the Japanese occupational government. As these two move deftly between Shanghai's tea parties and secret interrogations, they become embroiled in the complicated politics of wartime - and in a mutual attraction that may be more than what they expected.

Nicolle Wallace's third riveting insider Washington novel tells the story of single day in the life of America's 45th President, Charlotte Kramer. The day commences before sunrise with more than a dozen news crews "embedded" with the president, vice president and the White House senior staff to chronicle a typical day at the center of American political power. While the president is delivering a speech in downtown Washington, D.C., the day takes an unexpected and terrifying turn when multiple terrorist attacks are reported from five different U.S. cities. With the cameras and press corps closely watching her every move, the president navigates the ongoing threat to the nation she loves and has vowed to protect and defend. The explosive events of the day force President Kramer to confront long-simmering tensions among her senior staff and within her immediate family.