Literary Fiction Political

The Crescent City after the war is at the heart of a rapidly changing America, and ex-sailor Jack Rodenko is caught up in a strange and shifting milieu as he tends bar at a seedy club called L’Êtoile. While struggling to build a new life, Rodenko becomes involved with a corrupt, greedy power broker, and falls in love with a striking photographer - relationships that will force him to choose between two decidedly different futures.

Septembre 1938. Hitler est prêt à déclarer la guerre. Le premier ministre du Royaume-Uni, Chamberlain, fera tout pour conserver la paix. Tout se jouera dans une ville : Munich. Tandis que l'avion de Chamberlain survole la manche, Hitler quitte le sud de Berlin en train. Tous deux se dirigent vers Munich. De leur côté, deux jeunes hommes entament le même voyage : Hugh Legat, secrétaire privé de Chamberlain, et Paul Hartmann, diplomate allemand et membre de la résistance au nazisme.

Already an international sensation and prize-winning best seller in France, an evocative coming-of-age story of a young boy, a lost childhood, and a shattered homeland. Burundi, 1992. For 10-year-old Gabriel, life in his comfortable expatriate neighborhood of Bujumbura with his French father, Rwandan mother and little sister Ana, is something close to paradise. These are carefree days of laughter and adventure - sneaking Supermatch cigarettes and gorging on stolen mangoes - as he and his mischievous gang of friends transform their tiny cul-de-sac into their kingdom.

Here is an extraordinary portrait of one of the most complicated - and misunderstood - figures among the Founding Fathers. In 1804, while serving as vice president, Aaron Burr fought a duel with his political nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, and killed him. In 1807, he was arrested, tried, and acquitted of treason. In 1833, Burr is newly married, an aging statesman considered a monster by many. But he is determined to tell his own story, and he chooses to confide in a young New York City journalist. Burr is the first novel in Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series.

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.

Ravaged by the Change, an island nation in a time very like our own has built the Wall - an enormous concrete barrier around its entire coastline. Joseph Kavanagh, a new Defender, has one task: to protect his section of the Wall from the Others, the desperate souls who are trapped amid the rising seas outside and are a constant threat. Failure will result in death or a fate perhaps worse: being put to sea and made an Other himself.

A cyberattack on an obscure US dam leaves thousands dead and the government wondering who attacked it, and why. When they realize it is just the tip of the iceberg - and that the safety of all of America is at stake - the president has no choice but to call in Luke Stone.

Louis Charles ("Lucy") Lynch has spent all his 60 years in upstate Thomaston, New York, married to the same woman, Sarah, for 40 of them, their son now a grown man. Like his late, beloved father, Lucy is an optimist, though he's had plenty of reasons not to be: chief among them his mother, still indomitably alive.

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.

On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California. One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity for embracing her captors' ideology and joining their revolutionary cell.

In a parched Southern California of the near future, Luz, once the poster child for the country's conservation movement, and Ray, an army deserter turned surfer, are squatting in a starlet's abandoned mansion. Most "Mojavs", prevented by armed vigilantes from freely crossing borders to lusher regions, have allowed themselves to be evacuated to encampments in the east. Holdouts like Ray and Luz subsist on rationed cola and water and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise.

One starless night Janie's childhood was swept away by the terrors of the Khmer Rouge. Exiled from Phnom Penh, Janie and her family were forced to live out in the open: cold, hungry, and under constant surveillance. Caught up in a political storm that brought starvation to millions, tore families apart, and changed the world forever, Janie lost everyone she loved. Now, three decades later, Janie's life in Montreal is unraveling.

In the fourth of the ‘Palliser’ stories, Trollope follows Phineas Finn’s return to the dangerous world of Westminster politics. When his political rival is murdered, Phineas is thrown under suspicion and eventually finds himself standing trial at the Old Bailey. The situation is complicated by the presence of two women in his life: his old flame Lady Laura, whose estranged husband is determined to destroy Phineas’s reputation, and the wealthy and enigmatic widow, Madame Max.

In one of the poorest parts of rural New Hampshire, teenage girls have been disappearing, snatched from back country roads, never to be seen alive again. For 17-year-old Marjorie Richards, the fear raised by these abductions is the backdrop to what she lives with in her own home, every day. Marjorie has been raised by parents so intentionally isolated from normal society that they have developed their own dialect, a kind of mountain hybrid of English that displays both their ignorance of and disdain for the wider world.

Three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti, a world in the grip of the corrupt 'Papa Doc' and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister secret police. Brown the hotelier, Smith the innocent American, and Jones the confidence man - these are the 'comedians' of Graham Greene's title. Hiding behind their actors' masks, they hesitate on the edge of life. And, to begin with, they are men afraid of love, afraid of pain, afraid of fear itself.

In a town at the foot of the northern Highlands, life goes on as always, but people are in a state of shock: A bank has been robbed, a sure sign of the Westernization of this backward Balkan land. Meanwhile, other strange events - such as the marriage of a girl and a snake - confirm that ancient legends still prevail. People are flocking from far and wide to search for a tunnel to the Secret State Archives, said to house records of crimes they may have committed. Some even claim the ghosts of former dictators Hoxha, Brezhnev, and Ulbricht - not to mention Oedipus - have been seen there....

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.

Somewhere in the United Kingdom, an eight year old boy is removed from his home in the middle of the night. He is a victim of an extraordinary experiment. In an attempt to reform society, the government has divided the population into four groups, each group representing a different personality type.

Saeed is the comic hero, the luckless fool, whose tale tells of the aggression and resistance, terror and heroism, reason and loyalty, that typify the hardships and struggles of Arabs in Israel. An informer for the Zionist state, his stupidity, candor, and cowardice make him more of a victim than a villain; but in a series of tragicomic episodes, he is gradually transformed from a disaster-haunted, gullible collaborator into a Palestinian—no hero still, but a simple man intent on survival and, perhaps, happiness.

Only four years after publishing his fable Animal Farm, a biting satire of Joseph Stalin’s horrific regime of terror, George Orwell turned his attention to the future. But his next book was to be no satire, no fable. What emerged from Orwell’s pen in 1949 was the most grimly dystopian novel ever written: 1984.