Mallon has a gift” -The Wall Street Journal Mallon’s many other novels, the writing is crisp and witty, the central characters complex and sympathetic in surprising ways, the narrative structure tight. Landfall is fascinating.” - Kurt Anderson, The New York Times Book Review It is to novels as good studio movies are to movies-extremely well-made, satisfying if you have a taste for genre occasionally excellent. Landfall is smart and knowing and absorbing. The true believer and the skeptic who end up exchanging ideological places in a romantic and political drama that unfolds in locations from New Orleans to Baghdad and during the parties, press conferences, and state funerals of Washington, D.C.

The story is deepened and driven by a love affair between two West Texans, Ross Weatherall and Allison O’Connor, whose destinies have been affixed to Bush’s since they were teenagers in the 1970s. A gallery of political and media figures, from the widowed Nancy Reagan to the philandering John Edwards to the brilliantly contrarian Christopher Hitchens, bring the novel and the era to life.

They include his acerbic, crafty mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush his desperately correct and eager-to-please secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice the gnomic and manipulative Donald Rumsfeld foreign leaders from Tony Blair to Vladimir Putin and the caustic one-woman chorus of Ann Richards, Bush’s predecessor as governor of Texas. The president at the novel’s center possesses a personality whose high-speed alternations between charm and petulance, resoluteness and self-pity, continually energize and mystify the panoply of characters around him. Bush years-amid the twin catastrophes of the Iraq insurgency and Hurricane Katrina- Landfall brings Thomas Mallon’s cavalcade of contemporary American politics, which began with Watergate and continue with Finale, to a vivid and emotional climax. Set during the tumultuous middle of the George W.

Finale by thomas mallon