This intricate, fast-paced story, whose many scenes and details fit together like so many pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, is Didion’s incisive and chilling look at a modern world where things are not working as they should and where the oblique and official language is as sinister as the events it is covering up.
The narrator introduces Elena McMahon, estranged from a life of celebrity fundraisers and from her powerful West Coast husband, Wynn Janklow, whom she has left, taking Catherine, her daughter, to become a reporter for The Washington Post. Suddenly walking off the 1984 campaign, she finds herself boarding a plane for Florida to see her father, Dick McMahon. She becomes embroiled in her Dick’s business though “she had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what he was doing.” It is from this moment that she is caught up in something much larger than she could have imagined, something that includes Ambassador-at-Large Treat Austin Morrison and Alexander Brokaw, the ambassador to an unnamed Caribbean island.
Into this startling vision of conspiracies, arms dealing, and assassinations, Didion makes connections among Dallas, Iran-Contra, and Castro, and points up how “spectral companies with high-concept names tended to interlock.” As this book builds to its terrifying finish, we see the underpinnings of a dark historical underbelly. This is our system, the one “trying to create a context for democracy and getting İits ̈ hands a little dirty in the process.”
Hamnet
An American Marriage - 2019 Winner
Home Fire - 2018 Winner
The Power - 2017 Winner
The Glorious Heresies - 2016 Winner
How to be both - 2015 Winner
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing - 2014 Winner
May We Be Forgiven - 2013 Winner
The Song of Achilles - 2012 Winner
The Tiger's Wife - 2011 Winner
The Lacuna - 2010 Winner
Home - 2009 Winner
The Road Home - 2008 Winner
Half of a Yellow Sun - 2007 Winner
On Beauty - 2006 Winner
We Need to Talk About Kevin - 2005 Winner
Small Island - 2004 Winner
Property - 2003 Winner
Bel Canto - 2002 Winner
The Idea of Perfection - 2001 Winner
When I Lived in Modern Times - 2000 Winner
A Crime in the Neighborhood - 1999 Winner
Larry’s Party - 1998 Winner
Fugitive Pieces - 1997 Winner
A Spell of Winter - 1996 Winner
VOTE
Vote for your favourite #WomensPrize winner
Cast your vote for your favourite #ReadingWomen book and decide who will be our Winner of Winners in our 25th year.
Sign up to the Women's Prize for Fiction newsletter and win all 25 Prize winning books, including our 2020 winner Hamnet.
You'll be the first to hear about exciting author events and our latest news, and you can unsubscribe at any time.