Literary Fiction Political

Summer, 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are dead. The assassination conspiracies have begun to unravel. A dirty-tricks squad is getting ready to deploy at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Black militants are warring in southside L.A. The Feds are concocting draconian countermeasures. And fate has placed three men at the vortex of History.

From the former communications director for the White House and current political media strategist comes a suspenseful and smart novel about the first female president and all dramas and deceptions she faces both in politics and in love. Eighteen Acres, a description used by political insiders when referring to the White House complex, follows the first female President of the United States, Charlotte Kramer, and her staff as they take on dangerous threats.

With The Blazing World, internationally best­selling author Siri Hustvedt returns to the New York art world in her most masterful and urgent novel since What I Loved. Hustvedt, who has long been celebrated for her “beguiling, lyrical prose” ( The Sunday Times Books, London), tells the provocative story of the artist Harriet Burden. After years of watching her work ignored or dismissed by critics, Burden conducts an experiment she calls Maskings: She presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.

St. Petersburg, New Year's Eve, 1916. Marina Makarova is a young woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life, a life about to be violently upended by the vast forces of history. Swept up on these tides, Marina will join the marches for workers' rights, fall in love with a radical young poet, and betray everything she holds dear before being betrayed in turn.

Lincoln is the cornerstone of Gore Vidal’s fictional American chronicle, which includes Burr; 1876; Washington, D.C.; Empire; and Hollywood. It opens early on a frozen winter morning in 1861, when President-elect Abraham Lincoln slips into Washington, flanked by two bodyguards. The future president is in disguise, for there is talk of a plot to murder him. During the next four years there will be numerous plots to murder this man who has sworn to unite a disintegrating nation.

A Nigerian graduate student who has made his home in America knows what it means to strike out for new shores. When his wife proposes that he accompany her to Berlin, where she has been awarded a prestigious arts fellowship, he has his reservations. In Berlin, he is thrown into contact with a community of African immigrants and refugees whose lives previously seemed distant from his own, but to which he is increasingly drawn. The walls between his privileged, secure existence and the stories of these other Africans on the move soon crumble.

From renowned translators Richard Pevear and Lindsay Volokhonsky comes a new translation - certain to become the definitive version - of the first great prison memoir, a fictionalized account of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.

In contemporary London, a loose-knit group of political vagabonds drifts from one cause to the next, picketing and strategizing for hypothetical situations. But within this world, one particular small commune is moving inexorably toward active terrorism. At its center is Alice Mellings, a brilliant organizer who knows how to cope with almost anything, except the vacuum of her own life.

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.

A student at the University of Baghdad must return to his small village home when the Americans invade Iraq. There, he witnesses American soldiers kill the benign village idiot, bomb a wedding, and finally, terrorize his family in his own home. Consumed by the desire for vengeance, the youth leaves for the city, where he is taken in by a radical group.

Roland Nair calls himself Scandinavian but travels on a U.S. passport. After ten years' absence, he returns to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to reunite with his friend Michael Adriko. They once made a lot of money here during the country's civil war, and, curious to see whether good luck will strike twice in the same place, Nair has allowed himself to be drawn back to a region he considers hopeless.

An unnamed country is leaving the darkness of a decade at war, and to commemorate the armistice, the government commissions a new road connecting two halves of the state. Two men, foreign contractors from the same company, are sent to finish the highway. While one is flighty and adventurous, wanting to experience the nightlife and people, the other wants only to do the work and go home. But both men must eventually face the absurdities of their positions and the dire consequences of their presence.

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.

Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of its monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable and beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys, Amir and Hassan, growing up in Kabul. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him.

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.

Amparándose en la coartada del terrorismo islámico, unos políticos teócratas se hacen con el poder y, como primera medida, suprimen la libertad de prensa y los derechos de las mujeres. Esta trama, inquietante y oscura, que bien podría encontrarse en cualquier obra actual, pertenece en realidad a esta novela escrita por Margaret Atwood a principios de los ochenta, en la que la afamada autora canadiense anticipó con llamativa premonición una amenaza latente en el mundo de hoy.

Expert in recognizing and anticipating behavioral patterns - a skill enhanced by her bipolar disorder she keeps secret to protect her career - Carrie is increasingly certain that a terrorist plot has been set in motion. She risks a shocking act of insubordination that helps her uncover secret evidence connecting Nightingale with Abu Nazir, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Determined to stop the terrorist mastermind, she embarks on an obsessive quest that will nearly destroy her.

Butterfly Winter, W.P. Kinsella's first novel in 15 years, is the story of Julio and Esteban Pimental, twins born in the Caribbean country of Courteguay, a lush and enchanted but impoverished enclave on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic where time moves at its own pace and reality is open to question. The brothers are destined to play ball in America, and to shape the history of their baseball-crazed homeland. They mature quickly and by the age of 10 they leave home for the Major Leagues.

Lieutenant James Shelley, who has an uncanny knack for premeditating danger, leads a squad of advanced US Army military tasked with enforcing the peace around a conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. The squad members are linked wirelessly 24/7 to themselves and a central intelligence that guides them via drone relay - and unbeknownst to Shelley and his team, they are being recorded for a reality TV show.

A timely and gripping novel in which a son tries to solve the mystery of his father's death - a man who tried but could not forget a troubled past in his native Lebanon. Pierre Cormier had secrets. Though he married twice, became a high-flying lawyer and a father, he didn't let anyone really know him. And he was especially silent about what had happened to him in Lebanon, the country he fled during civil war to come to Canada as a refugee. When, in the midst of a corporate scandal, he went missing after his boat exploded, his teenaged son Cyril didn't know how to mourn him.