Books with category Political Drama
Displaying 4 books

The Future Was Color

2024

by Patrick Nathan

A dazzling novel about making art, desire, and the inextricable link between the personal and the political set against the decadence of post-war Los Angeles. George is a Hungarian immigrant working as a studio hack writing monster movies in 1950s Los Angeles. He must navigate the McCarthy era studio system filled with possible Communists and spies; the life of closeted men along Sunset Boulevard; the inability of the era to disassemble love from persecution and guilt.

But when a famous actress named Madeleine offers George a writing residency at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world changes dramatically. Soon it's drinks by the pool every night, pleasure in every direction, and Madeleine carrying him like an ornament into a class of postwar L.A. society ordinarily hidden from men like him.

What this lifestyle hides behind, aside from the monsters on the screen, are the monsters dwelling closer to home: this endless bacchanalia covers a gnawing hole shelled wide by the horror of the war they'd thought they left behind. Beneath his newfound relationships lie the pernicious forces of the American political project. And what George can never escape: his past as György, the queer Jew who fled Budapest before the war, landing in New York all alone a decade prior.

In New York as in California, the people he loves aren't what they seem—and neither is his adopted country, one pretending to have transcended bigotry, authoritarianism, and violence. The Future Was Color is an immaculately written exploration of making art and reinventing the self, post-war American decadence, and the psychosis that lingers in a world that's seen the bomb. Spanning from sun-drenched Los Angeles, to hidden corners of working-class New York, to a virtuosic climax in the Las Vegas desert, it upends our perceptions of just how personal the political can be.

Mobility

2023

by Lydia Kiesling

Mobility is a propulsive novel about class, power, politics, and desire by the celebrated author of The Golden State. The year is 1998, the End of History. The Soviet Union is dissolved, the Cold War is over, and Bunny Glenn is an American teenager in Azerbaijan with her Foreign Service family.

Through Bunny's eyes we watch global interests flock to the former Soviet Union during the rush for Caspian oil and pipeline access, hear rumbles of the expansion of the American security state and the buildup to the War on Terror. We follow Bunny from adolescence to middle age--from Azerbaijan to America--as the entwined idols of capitalism and ambition lead her to a career in the oil industry, and eventually back to the scene of her youth, where familiar figures reappear in an era of political and climate breakdown.

Both geopolitical exploration and domestic coming-of-age novel, Mobility is a propulsive and challenging story about class, power, politics, and desire told through the life of one woman--her social milieu, her romances, her unarticulated wants. Mobility deftly explores American forms of complicity and inertia, moving between the local and the global, the personal and the political, and using fiction's power to illuminate the way a life is shaped by its context.

In the Time of the Butterflies

2010

by Julia Alvarez

Set during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960, In the Time of the Butterflies is an extraordinary novel that tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands. This tale of courage and sisterhood is inspired by the true story of the three Mirabal sisters who, in 1960, were murdered for their part in an underground plot to overthrow the government. Julia Alvarez breathes life into these historical figures--known as "las mariposas," or "the butterflies," in the underground--as she imagines their teenage years, their gradual involvement with the revolution, and their terror as their dissentience is uncovered.

Alvarez's controlled writing perfectly captures the mounting tension as "the butterflies" near their horrific end. The novel begins with the recollections of Dede, the fourth and surviving sister, who fears abandoning her routines and her husband to join the movement. Alvarez also offers the perspectives of the other sisters: brave and outspoken Minerva, the family's political ringleader; pious Patria, who forsakes her faith to join her sisters after witnessing the atrocities of the tyranny; and the baby sister, sensitive Maria Teresa, who, in a series of diaries, chronicles her allegiance to Minerva and the physical and spiritual anguish of prison life.

Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez's imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression.

Exodus

1983

by Leon Uris

Exodus is an international publishing phenomenon—the towering novel of the twentieth century's most dramatic geopolitical event. Leon Uris magnificently portrays the birth of a new nation in the midst of enemies—the beginning of an earthshaking struggle for power. Here is the tale that swept the world with its fury: the story of an American nurse, an Israeli freedom fighter caught up in a glorious, heartbreaking, triumphant era. Here is Exodus—one of the great bestselling novels of all time.

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