Bücher von Jonathan Dee

';Summons up a small American town at precisely the right moment in our history . . . a bold, vital, and view-expanding novel.'George SaundersA rural working-class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this inspired novel for our timesfiction in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan.A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK Mark Firth is a contractor and home restorer in Howland, Massachusetts, who feels opportunity passing his family by. After being swindled by a financial advisor, what future can Mark promise his wife, Karen, and their young daughter, Haley? He finds himself envying the wealthy weekenders in his community whose houses sit empty all winter. Philip Hadi used to be one of these people. But in the nervous days after 9/11 he flees New York and hires Mark to turn his Howland home into a year-round ';secure location' from which he can manage billions of dollars of other people's money. The collision of these two men's very different worldsrural vs. urban, middle class vs. wealthyis the engine of Jonathan Dee's powerful new novel. Inspired by Hadi, Mark looks around for a surefire investment: the mid-decade housing boom. Over Karen's objections, and teaming up with his troubled brother, Gerry, Mark starts buying up local property with cheap debt. Then the town's first selectman dies suddenly, and Hadi volunteers for office. He soon begins subtly transforming Howland in his imagewith unexpected results for Mark and his extended family. Here are the dramas of twenty-first-century Americarising inequality, working class decline, a new authoritarianismplayed 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. Praise for The Locals';After 9/11, New York hedge fund billionaire Philip Hadi retreats to his summer home in the Berkshires. In thrall to his new town, he runs for office to keep it sleepy, sweet and free from tax hikes. Is he benevolent, arrogant or both? No one gets off the moral hook in this propulsive, brilliantly observed study.'People (Book of the Week) ';Thoughtful . . . [Jonathan Dee's] prescient sensitivity has never been more unnerving. . . . Amid the heat of today's vicious political climate, The Locals is a smoke alarm. Listen up.'Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Combining finely tuned suspense with provocative insights into the nature of good and evil, The Liberty Campaign is a novel of stunning psychological depth and power.Gene Trowbridge, a sixty-five-year-old successful advertising executive, fills the days before his retirement assessing his past and considering the future. A deliberate and thoughtful man, Gene lives a solid, peaceful existence with his wife in a genteel Long Island suburb, watching on television the failure of his son Jack's professional baseball career and increasingly aware of his own displacement in a field dominated by the very young. But a chance meeting with Albert Ferdinand, a reclusive neighbor who wins his regard and friendship, upsets the tenuous balance of Gene's world. From the scandal that comes to surround Ferdinand, Gene is brought face to face with the unimaginable depths of cruelty that lie well beyond his complacent suburban community. Spurred on by a persistent journalist and overwhelmed by self-doubt stemming from his instinctive liking and acceptance of a man of potentially indescribable evil, Gene is drawn into a suspenseful search for the truth about Ferdinand's past. In The Liberty Campaign, critically acclaimed author Jonathan Dee has created one of the wisest and most memorable voices in recent fiction. When Gene is ultimately presented with a stark ethical choice and forced to reevaluate his judgment and his principles, Dee captures, with extraordinary precision and power, the vulnerable time in the life of an aging man when he falters, not sure that his own life experience has provided him with the ability to act. The Liberty Campaign is a riveting, multilayered portrait of an ordinary man whose moral universe is tested by a situation that defies the parameters of his decidedly American upbringing and sensibility.