Literary Fiction Political

Every now and then, we come across a novel that moves us like no other, that seems like a miracle of the imagination, and that haunts us long after the book is closed. James Levine’s The Blue Notebook is that kind of book. It is the story of Batuk, an Indian girl who is taken to Mumbai from the countryside and sold into prostitution by her father; the blue notebook is her diary, in which she recalls her early childhood, records her life on the Common Street, and makes up beautiful and fantastic tales.

Oliver's Tale is a thinker's piece and while written in the same spirit as George Orwell's Animal Farm it has its own unique social, political, and religious message to be discovered by readers. Surrounded by a colorful cast of animal characters, Oliver experiences a spiritual growth in his relationship with God as he becomes privy to the secret plan of the Gray Skunk, the most mesmerizing and dangerous foe the Cove has ever faced.

With droll humor and biting wit, critically acclaimed author James Whorton, Jr. pens enjoyable novels in the tradition of John Kennedy Toole and Walker Percy. In Frankland, a socially challenged young man named John H. Tolley aspires to be a prestigious historian despite his lack of a college degree. To that end, he embarks on a journey to east Tennessee to track down 17th President Andrew Johnson’s secret papers, which may or may not actually exist. When he arrives, he meets a quirky group of people who inadvertently serve to obstruct him....

Javier Mallarino is a living legend. He is his country's most influential political cartoonist, the consciousness of a nation. A man capable of repealing laws, overturning judges' decisions, destroying politicians' careers with his art. His weapons are pen and ink. Those in power fear him and pay him homage. At 65, after four decades of a brilliant career, he's at the height of his powers. But this all changes when he's paid an unexpected visit from a young woman.

In 1983 junior diplomat and brilliant linguist Angela Morgan witnessed the death of her young husband during the bombing of the US embassy in Beirut. Devastated by her loss, she fled back to Washington, DC, and hid in the backwaters of the US State Department. With the exception of a two-year tour of duty in the former Soviet Union in the late '80s, she managed for almost two decades to avoid high-profile postings that would advance her career.

In 1980 a rural Cuban family is torn apart during the Mariel Boatlift. Uxbal Encarnación - father, husband, political insurgent - refuses to leave behind the revolutionary ideals and lush tomato farms of his sun-soaked homeland. His wife, Soledad, takes young Isabel and Ulises hostage and flees with them to America, leaving behind Uxbal for the promise of a better life.

A riveting novel about two women - one Serbian, one Bosnian - whose deep friendship spans decades and continents, war and peace, love, and estrangement, in the vein of Elena Ferrante and Julia Alvarez. From the moment Marija walks into Lara's classroom, freshly moved to Serbia from Sarajevo, Lara is enchanted by her vibrant beauty, confidence, and wild energy - and knows that the two are destined to be lifelong friends. But when the Bosnian War pits their homelands against each other in a bloodbath, Lara and Marija are forced to separate for the first time.

Nolan Jackson is a journeyman carpenter by trade and a wanderer by nature. And in 2007, while fellow Americans fight in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Nolan roams, traveling between jobs building tract homes across the West. Following a shocking workplace accident in Las Vegas, he uproots himself from the tentative relationships he has made and heads toward the ocean.

Set against the backdrop of Argentina's Dirty War and infused with magical realism, The Blue Line is a breathtaking story of love and betrayal by one of the world's most renowned writers and activists. Ingrid Betancourt, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Even Silence Has An End, draws on history and personal experience in this deeply felt portrait of a woman coming of age as her country falls deeper and deeper into chaos.

Ceridwen Dovey's debut novel is a stunning literary achievement and an acute character study of three men held captive after a military coup. All linked closely with the deposed president, the portraitist longs for his pregnant wife, the chef takes solace in preparing meals for the new regime, and the barber lives with the knowledge that he'd often held a razor to the throat of the man responsible for his brother's death.

The unexpected discovery in 2009 of a completed manuscript of Claude McKay's final novel was celebrated as one of the most significant literary events in recent years. Building on the already extraordinary legacy of McKay's life and work, this colorful, dramatic novel centers on the efforts by Harlem intelligentsia to organize support for the liberation of fascist-controlled Ethiopia, a crucial but largely forgotten event in American history.

Part Primary Colors, part House of Cards, The Means takes you deep into high-stakes politics where everyone has something to hide. Tom Pauley is a conservative trial attorney in Durham, NC, who is tapped by GOP leaders to campaign for the Governor's mansion. His bold style makes him a favorite for a run at the White House. Mitchell Mason is the president-elect of the United States, pushed into politics by a father determined to create a political dynasty.

When God descends to earth as a Dinka woman from Sudan and subsequently dies in the Darfur desert, the result is a world bizarrely new yet eerily familiar. In Ron Currie's provocative, wise, and emotionally resonant novel we meet God himself; the Dinka woman whose mortality He must suffer when He inhabits her body; people all over the world coping with the devastating news of God's demise.

Nineteen fifty-three is synonymous in the British memory with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on 2 June. But less well known is what happened in 10 Downing Street on 23 June. With Anthony Eden vying for power, the elderly prime minister, Winston Churchill, must maintain the confidence of his government, the press and the public. But after a diplomatic dinner at which he is in typically sparkling form, Churchill's Italian dining companions are rushed out of the building, and his doctor called.

In the Cambodian hinterlands, a lone Western prisoner suffers through a hot, muddy, interminable sentence. Wasted by repeated torture, lack of sleep, malnutrition, and psychotropic drugs, he has been abandoned. His years of exemplary service to his government mean nothing. No one is coming for him.

At once a coming-of-age tale and a heart-rending love story, Wild Ginger explores the devastating experience of the Cultural Revolution, which defined Anchee Min’s youth. The beautiful, iron-willed Wild Ginger is only in elementary school when she is singled out by the Red Guards for her "foreign-colored eyes". Her classmate Maple is also a target of persecution. The novel chronicles the two girls’ maturing in Shanghai in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Chairman Mao ruled absolutely and his followers took up arms in his name.

Jamie McAlister has resigned herself to the fact that in this job market, her painfully expensive degree might only get her a position at Starbucks, when she suddenly lands a prestigious internship at the White House. Although she doesn’t hit it off with the other interns, she is eager to work hard and make the best of the opportunity while it lasts. An unexpected encounter late one evening with the charismatic President Gregory Rutland seems like just a fleeting flirtation, but when he orchestrates clandestine meetings and late-night phone calls, their relationship quickly escalates....

Inspired by 50 years of Cuban literary noir, from Cold Tales by Virgilio Piera to Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls, Robert Arellano's Havana Lunar intertwines an insider testimony on the collapse of socialist Cuba with a psychological mystery.

Wry, moving, beautifully observed and politically astute, this latest audiobook from one of New Zealand's finest chroniclers pinpoints universal truths through very NZ lives. Life isn't always like it appears in the movies. In 1952 Irene Sandle takes her young daughter to Motueka. Irene was widowed during the war and is seeking a new start and employment in the tobacco fields. There, she finds the reality of her life far removed from the glamour of the screen.

In 1994 Marko Novak's world is torn apart by the death of his best friend - Kemal Lekic, a soldier in the Bosnian war. After the funeral Marko flees to England, hoping to put his broken homeland behind him. In 2004 human rights researcher Anya Teal is following a tenuous lead in the hunt for a Bosnian man with blood on his hands. What no one can know is that a disaster as destructive as war is approaching...a disaster that will connect the fates of Marko and Anya across the years and continents.