Political Fiction

Award-winning journalist and author Simon Winchester takes readers on a personal tour of the Balkans. Combining history and interviews with the people who live there, Winchester offers a fascinating glimpse into the complex issues at work in this chaotic region. Unrest in the Balkans has gone on for centuries. A seasoned reporter, Winchester visited the region twenty years ago. When Kosovo reached crisis level in 1997, Winchester thought a return visit to the beleaguered area would help to make sense out of the awful violence.

Why we think it’s a great listen: Never before has an author’s narration of his fiction been so important to fully grasping the book’s impact and global implications. Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of its monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them.

It’s been 20 years since 9/11, two decades since the United States was attacked on home soil and set out to make the guilty pay with their lives. In the shadows, the enemy has been patient - learning, and adapting. And the enemy is ready to strike again. A new president offers hope to a country weary of conflict. He’s a young, popular, self-made visionary…but he’s also a man with a secret.

Against all odds we have made it into the last half of the 1990s. The Cold War looks solved, Arabs and Jews are talking, confrontation is on the wane. In this new harmony, one discord - what becomes of unemployed terrorists? You can bet they aren't going to retire quietly. Shunned by the Soviets, isolated by Middle Eastern realignment, one cadre hits on a scheme to jump-start the war machine. It's brilliant in its simplicity. With a single act they bring the world to nuclear boil. Jack Ryan and Dan Murray sweat to defuse a cataclysmic response.

A fugitive tech billionaire. A rogue spy. The chase is on in the first three books in the international best-selling technothriller series.

Tom Clancy returns to Jack Ryan's early days, in an extraordinary new novel of global political drama. Ryan's first days on the job at the CIA put him into a high-stakes game, playing for the life of the Pope and the stability of the Western world.

Cybersecurity super-sleuth Frank Adversego finds himself trapped in a power play between the FBI and the CIA as hackers try to destroy the USA. Only by defeating the Alexandria Project can he clear himself.

This epic novel by master writer James Clavell, loosely based on the Namamugi Incident and Anglo-Satsuma War that took place in the late 1800s, is a richly researched, panoramic view of Japan’s budding relationship with the Western powers, its sweeping societal changes, and the political upheaval that followed.

The foundation for all modern economic thought and political economy, The Wealth of Nations is the magnum opus of Scottish economist Adam Smith, who introduces the world to the very idea of economics and capitalism in the modern sense of the words.

A sinister enemy is stalking elite military operator Red Harmon and his loved ones. Turning the hunter into his prey, Red uncovers a plot that spans nations and draws him into the remote snow-covered ravines of North Korea. His objective: penetrate the darkest prisons of this mysterious nation to restore national security - and save all he holds dear. Red's not the only one who's been living with secrets. His wife Lori is a lot more than the typical suburban soccer mom she appears to be, and she's stumbled onto something massive.

When shadow warrior and former Tier One Navy SEAL John Dempsey goes undercover to meet with a Vory arms dealer, he thinks he’s laying the groundwork to penetrate the Russian criminal underground. Instead, he walks into a trap orchestrated by Zeta, the secret Russian task force behind a recent assassination attempt on the US President. For Dempsey and his team, the only way out is to lay waste to the Russians, putting a target on Ember’s back.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker, an enthralling historical saga that recreates the danger, romance, and sacrifice of an era and brings to life one courageous, passionate American - Mildred Fish Harnack - and her circle of women friends who waged a clandestine battle against Hitler in Nazi Berlin.

Before he was considered a CIA superagent, before he was thought of as a terrorist's worst nightmare, and before he was both loathed and admired by the politicians on Capitol Hill, Mitch Rapp was a gifted college athlete without a care in the world...and then tragedy struck.

Trained to endure extreme danger and survive impossible odds, elite military operator Red Harmon has battled our nation's enemies for years. While in the Rocky Mountains for R and R, his family is violently attacked by an international squad of assassins. No ordinary wet-team, this group is only the vanguard of a power play threatening national security. Red and his young daughter escape a brutal firefight but are separated from his wife. Evading through the woodlands, stripped of his unit's support, Red puts his survival skills to the test.

When a woman is kidnapped off a Chicago street in broad daylight, Jack Reacher's in the wrong place at the wrong time. He's kidnapped with her. Chained together and racing across America toward an unknown destination, they're at the mercy of a group of men demanding an impossible ransom. Because Reacher's female companion is worth more than he imagines. Now he has to save them both - from the inside out - or die trying....

Navy SEAL Keith “Chunk” Redman has been one of the military’s top doorkickers since the day he pinned on his trident: loyal, single-minded, lethal. Tasked to lead a new, covert team of Tier One SEALs—the most elite special operators in the world—Chunk can no longer simply rely on the status quo. To safeguard America, he needs help to stay a step ahead of its adversaries.

The phone rings and the offer is made, leaving you only seconds to decide. Betray your country, or watch your family drop dead before your eyes. After the Iron Curtain's collapse, Russia appears to be finished as a superpower. But KGB general Vasily Karpov is secretly working to restore Russia's status by forcing Americans into traitorous acts of espionage and sabotage, with the aid of a new secret weapon.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days. The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes.

In a scrap heap within an abandoned factory, the greatest invention in history lies dormant and unused. By what fatal error of judgment has its value gone unrecognized, its brilliant inventor punished rather than rewarded for his efforts? In defense of those greatest of human qualities that have made civilization possible, one man sets out to show what would happen to the world if all the heroes of innovation and industry went on strike.

Ian Dunross, the current tai-pan of the illustrious yet financially troubled Struan empire, is racing to undo the damage his predecessor left behind and to once again stand on stable ground. And he’ll do whatever it takes—including striking a hard-fought deal with an American millionaire. But his rival, Quillan Gornt, has other plans. Suddenly caught in a dubious plot involving Soviet spies, Hong Kong’s criminal underground, and the hostile takeover of his company, Dunross holds nothing back in the fight for the Noble House.