Literary Fiction Political

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.

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.

A coming-of-age story, based on a recent shocking chapter of Argentine history, about a young woman who makes a devastating discovery about her origins with the help of an enigmatic houseguest.

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.

On a hot, insomniac night at the Hotel Metropol, the novelist Carlos Fuentes steps onto his balcony only to find another man on the balcony next door. The other man asks for news of the social strife turning into revolution in the unnamed city below them. He reveals himself as the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, permitted to revisit Earth once a year for 24 hours based on his theory of eternal return.

En el verano de 1978, cuando España no ha salido aún del franquismo y no termina de entrar en la democracia y las fronteras sociales y morales parecen más porosas que nunca, un adolescente llamado Ignacio Cañas conoce por casualidad al Zarco y a Tere, dos delincuentes de su edad, y ese encuentro cambiará para siempre su vida.

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.

Screenwriter, playwright, and novelist Stephen Miller crafts this harrowing tale about two people on opposite ends of the war on terror. Daria, an Iraqi refugee, has lost everything she holds dear - and now seeks revenge on those responsible. Recruited for a dangerous mission, she boards a plane to New York with instructions to make contact with - and infect - as many people as possible. Meanwhile, American scientist Dr. Sam Watterman is asked by the government to help locate a new threat.

Darcy, a restless young artist, travels to the Soviet Union to visit his elusive half-sister, Fin. Upon his arrival in the depths of a bleak Moscow winter, Darcy is immediately embroiled in Fin's mysterious life there and also drawn to Moscow's forbidden underground, finding himself swept up in political and sexual intrigues of a nature he could never have imagined.

At 33, Ryan Kealey has achieved more in his military and CIA career than most men can dream of in a lifetime. He's also seen the worst life has to offer and is lucky to have survived it. But being left alone with his demons is no longer an option. The CIA needs him badly, because the enemy they're facing is former U.S. soldier Jason March. Ryan knows all about March - he trained him.

Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: It sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn't count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother's skepticism, or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter.

Christopher Buckley's comic thriller takes readers to the Arab land of Matar, where a philandering emir allays his restless wife by allowing her to start a TV network for Arab women. She is joined in this endeavor by a maverick American State Department officer known as Florence, who wants to use the TV network to start a revolution among Islamic women.

When a nameless, struggling actor in 1970s New York gets the call that an enigmatic director wants him for an art film set in the Amazon, he doesn't hesitate: He flies to South America, no questions asked. He quickly realizes he's made a mistake. He's replacing another actor who quit after seeing the script - a script the director now claims doesn't exist. The movie is over budget. The production team seems headed for a breakdown. The air is so wet that the celluloid film disintegrates.

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.

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.

To uncover the truth about a friend's disappearance, a fragile young woman must silence the ghosts of her past in this moving debut tale that intertwines mystery, madness, betrayal, love, and literature. My past was never more than one thought, one breath, one heartbeat away. And then, on that particular October evening, it literally arrived at my doorstep.

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.

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.