Exiles in the Garden Book

“One of the most astute writers of American fictionâ? (New York Times Book Review) delivers the resonant story of Alec Malone, a senatorâ??s son who rejects the family business of politics for a career as a newspaper photographer. Alec and his Swiss wife, Lucia, settle in Georgetown next door to a couple whose émigré gatherings in their garden remind Lucia of all the things Americans are not. She leaves Alec as his career founders on his refusal of an assignment to cover the Vietnam War — a slyly subversive fictional choice from Ward Just, who was himself a renowned war correspondent.At the center of the novel is Alecâ??s unforeseen reckoning with Luciaâ??s long-absent father, Andre Duran, a Czech living out the end of his life in a hostel called Goya House. Duranâ??s career as an adventurer and antifascist commando is everything Alecâ??s is not. The encounter forces Alec to confront just how different a life where things—“terrible things, terrible thingsâ?—happen is from a life where nothing much happens at all.Read More