Thomas Mallon

A retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators.

The repercussions of Lincoln's assassination on two people who were with him at the time. Henry Rathbone cannot live down the thought that he, an army officer, did not save the president's life. Clara, his fiancee, feels guilty that she ignored the wounded Rathbone for the publicity of helping Mrs. Lincoln who was unhurt. The impact a public event can have on private lives, in this case leading to the murder of one and the incarceration in a mental...

Historical novel about the competing claims of faith, love, and politics during the McCarthy era. Washington, D.C., early 1950s: a world of bare-knuckled ideology, hard drinking, and secret dossiers, dominated by such outsized characters as Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta, and Joe McCarthy. Timothy Laughlin, recent Fordham graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism, meets a handsome, profligate State Department...

From "a master of the historical novel" (Newsweek), whose fiction "unfolds with the urgency of a thriller" (The New Yorker), the tumultuous--at once witty and sad--chronicle of George W. Bush's second term, as his aspirations toward greatness are thrown into upheaval by the twin catastrophes of Iraq and Katrina. Landfall has at its center a president whose high-speed shifts between charm and petulance, resoluteness and self-pity, continually energize...

Seventy-five years ago Mary McCarthy provoked a scandal with her electrifying debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942), announcing the arrival of a major new voice in American literature. A candid, thinly-veiled portrait of the late-1930s New York intellectual scene, its penetrating gaze and creative fusion of life and literature-"mutual plagiarism," she called it--became the hallmark of McCarthy's fiction, which the Library of America now presents...