Literary Fiction Political

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.

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Here is a big, panoramic story of the new America, as told by our master chronicler of the way we live now. Based on the same sort of detailed, on-scene, high-energy reporting that powered Tom Wolfe's previous best-selling novels, Back to Blood is another brilliant, spot-on, scrupulous, and often hilarious reckoning with our times.

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?

After a devastating experience in Darfur strips Alex Baines, former rising star of the State Department, of his security clearances, he is faced with two choices: spend the rest of his career in visa-stamping limbo or move to the private sector. On the verge of resigning, he receives a call from his old mentor with an incredible opportunity to start over, restoring both his security clearances and his reputation.

A beautifully written, unforgettable novel of a troubled marriage, set against the lush landscape and political turmoil of Trinidad. Monique Roffey's Orange Prize-shortlisted novel is a gripping portrait of post-colonialism that stands among great works by Caribbean writers like Jamaica Kincaid and Andrea Levy. When George and Sabine Harwood arrive in Trinidad from England, George is immediately seduced by the beguiling island, while Sabine feels isolated, heat-fatigued, and ill-at-ease.

"You're in a slump." Nick Lasseter's boss is talking about his job performance as a reporter for the Waterloo Weekly, but he might as well be talking about Nick's whole life. His current assignment, a profile of a legendary liberal ex-congressman, is in trouble even before the subject abruptly dies.

As the 21st century enters its second decade, foreign wars, the lingering recession, and a caustic political environment are taking their toll on Americans. But the party hasn't ended for Aidan Cole and his friends, a band of savvy, if cynical, New York journalists and bloggers who thrive at the intersection of media and celebrity.

After a decade living in England, Jeremy O'Keefe returns to New York, where he has been hired as a professor of German history at New York University. Though comfortable in his new life, and happy to be near his daughter once again, Jeremy continues to feel the quiet pangs of loneliness. Walking through the city at night, it's as though he could disappear and no one would even notice. But soon Jeremy's life begins taking strange turns.