Politics has been fairly polarised in recent times and maybe it’s that that is giving authors so much inspiration for politically motivated novels. There have been some brilliant political reads published in the last couple of years, focusing on various political situations around the world. Today we’re putting together the best of them in one fantastic reading list for you!
All of these recommended reads are either fiction, or read like fiction and are published as novels. Some are already on the shelves, others available for pre-order for later this year.
Secret Service – Tom Brady
(30th May 2019)
To those who don’t really know her, Kate Henderson’s life must seem perfectly ordinary. But she is in fact a senior MI6 officer, who right now is nursing the political equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
Kate’s most recent mission has yielded the startling intelligence that the British Prime Minister has cancer – and that one of the leading candidates to replace him may be a Russian agent of influence.
Up against the clock to uncover the Russian mole, Kate risks everything to get to the truth. But with her reputation to uphold, her family hanging by a thread and a leadership election looming, she is quickly running out of options, and out of time.
The Border – Don Winslow
(February 26th 2019)
What do you do when there are no borders? When the lines you thought existed simply vanish? How do you plant your feet to make a stand when you no longer know what side you’re on?
The war has come home.
For over forty years, Art Keller has been on the front lines of America’s longest conflict: The War on Drugs. His obsession to defeat the world’s most powerful, wealthy, and lethal kingpin―the godfather of the Sinaloa Cartel, Adán Barrera―has left him bloody and scarred, cost him the people he loves, even taken a piece of his soul.
Now Keller is elevated to the highest ranks of the DEA, only to find that in destroying one monster he has created thirty more that are wreaking even more chaos and suffering in his beloved Mexico. But not just there.
The Washington Decree – Jussi Adler Olsen
(August 7th 2018)
Sixteen years before Democratic Senator Bruce Jansen was elected president of the United States, a PR stunt brought together five very different people: fourteen-year-old Dorothy “Doggie” Rogers, small-town sheriff T. Perkins, single mother Rosalie Lee, well-known journalist John Bugatti, and the teenage son of one of Jansen’s employees, Wesley Barefoot. In spite of their differences, the five remain bonded by their shared experience and devotion to their candidate.
For Doggie, who worked the campaign trail with Wesley, Jansen’s election is a personal victory: a job in the White House, proof to her Republican father that she was right to support Jansen, and the rise of an intelligent, clear-headed leader with her same ideals. But the triumph is short-lived: Jansen’s pregnant wife is assassinated on election night, and the alleged mastermind behind the shooting is none other than Doggie’s own father.
The Hazards of Time Travel – Joyce Carol Oates
(November 27th 2018)
“Time travel” — and its hazards—are made literal in this astonishing new novel in which a recklessly idealistic girl dares to test the perimeters of her tightly controlled (future) world and is punished by being sent back in time to a region of North America — “Wainscotia, Wisconsin”—that existed eighty years before. Cast adrift in time in this idyllic Midwestern town she is set upon a course of “rehabilitation”—but cannot resist falling in love with a fellow exile and questioning the constrains of the Wainscotia world with results that are both devastating and liberating.
Arresting and visionary, Hazards of Time Travel is both a novel of harrowing discovery and an exquisitely wrought love story that may be Joyce Carol Oates’s most unexpected novel so far.
The Beekeeper of Allepo – Christy Lefteri
(August 27th 2019)
Nuri is a beekeeper and Afra, his wife, is an artist. Mornings, Nuri rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, Afra sells her colorful landscape paintings at the open-air market. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo—until the unthinkable happens. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. But escaping Syria will be no easy task: Afra has lost her sight, leaving Nuri to navigate her grief as well as a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece toward an uncertain future in Britain.
Nuri is sustained only by the knowledge that waiting for them is his cousin Mustafa, who has started an apiary in Yorkshire and is teaching fellow refugees the art of beekeeping. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss but dangers that would overwhelm even the bravest souls. Above all, they must make the difficult journey back to each other, a path once so familiar yet rendered foreign by the heartache of displacement.
Overthrow – Caleb Crain
(August 27th 2019)
Overthrow is a story about the aftermath of the search for a new moral idealism, in a world where new controls on us–through technology, surveillance, the law–seem to be changing the nature and shape of the boundaries that we imagine around our selves. Caleb Crain, with astonishing sensitivity, acuity, and grace, has captured the deep unease and ambiguity that threaten our contemporary lives, and has written a beautiful novel about the redemptive possibilities of love and friendship.
Sunshine in an Open Tomb – Tim Kinsella
(1st October 2019)
Set in fall 1988, Sunshine On An Open Tomb shuttles between two storylines: the creation of The CIA as a result of the Texas/Kingdom oil connection, and a love triangle involving the moon. Our narrator is the brooding runt of a political dynasty whose father is about to be appointed Prez. He is thoughtful, but has trouble expressing himself due to his many physical defects as a result of inbreeding. Desperate for content at the advent of the 24-hour news cycle, even our narrator is suddenly of interest to The Media. So after years of living freely among The Barbarians, The Family hides him away in one of its secret hideouts. Exhausted by the shape-shifting estate and his irresolvable love life, our narrator cloisters himself deep in the estate’s bunker and constructs a tomb around himself out of soup cans. Here he gets to work correcting the best-selling, so-called objective biography of The Family
Make Russia Great Again – Christopher Buckley
(November 5th 2019)
It’s the night of the election and Putin is preparing his acceptance speech—the same one he’s been giving for the past four years. The night should be like any other election night. Putin is ahead by 84 points in the polls and is slated to win by a landslide. But suddenly, when he’s about to step out of his black car, his team gets words that something is off. It appears that Putin isn’t ahead at all. In fact, he’s lost…
In this timely political satire, bestselling author Christopher Buckley crafts a hysterical scenario where the world powers have shifted. Putin has just been voted out of office—losing to a communist who is determined to restore the glory days of the Soviet Union. Global pandemonium breaks out as world leaders try to figure out who hacked the election.
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