Thomas Mallon

On the evening of Good Friday, 1865, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris joined the Lincolns in the presidential box at Ford's Theater, becoming eyewitnesses to one of the great tragedies of American history. In this riveting novel, Thomas Mallon re-creates the unusual love story of this young engaged couple whose fateful encounter with history profoundly affects the remainder of their lives. Lincoln's assassination is only one part of the remarkable...

Astronomy, politics, and romance join forces in this post-Civil War novel from the writer John Updike has called "one of the most interesting American novelists at work." It's the spring of 1877 in Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. Naval Observatory, Hugh Allison has conceived a secret ambition: to project an image through time and space. But his plan takes on urgent life only when the mathematically gifted Cynthia May enters his orbit as one of the...

"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...

"Captures the crusading ideologies, blunders, and glamour of the still-hotly-debated Reagan years, taking readers to the political gridiron of Washington, the wealthiest enclaves of Southern California, and the volcanic landscape of Iceland, where the president engages in two almost apocalyptic days of negotiation with Mikhail Gorbachev." --

"Here are three indispensable works from the Pulitzer Prize-winning laureate of the American heartland, including the novels that inspired a classic film by Orson Welles and an Oscar-nominated performance by Katharine Hepburn. The Magnificent Ambersons depicts the fall from grace of George Minafer, scion of the once-unassailable Amberson family whose wealth and grandeur are in precipitous decline. Alice Adams, perhaps Booth Tarkington's greatest work,...

Three novels by Mary McCarthy, the witty and provocative writer who defined a generation, including her landmark classic The Group, as well as McCarthy's final two novels Birds of America, and Cannibals and Missionaries, plus McCarthy's 1979 essay "The Novels that Got Away," on her unfinished fiction. The group: The lives and experiences of eight Vassar graduates during the thirty years following their graduation as they grapple with sex, sexism,...