Thomas Mallon

From one of our most esteemed historical novelists, a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators.
 
For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated—uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs—it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some

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It's the spring of 1877 in Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. Naval Observatory, great changes are afoot: historical, romantic, and scientific. When the brilliant Cynthia May-a Civil War widow whose beauty has been shadowed by worry and poverty-starts work as a human "computer" at the Observatory, astronomer Hugh Allison has found just the partner he needs for a radiant, half-crazed scheme that will make him live forever in the annals of science and...

Finale takes listeners to the political gridiron of Washington in 1986, 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. Along with Soviet dissidents, illegal arms traders, and antinuclear activists, the novel's memorable characters include Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter, Pamela Harriman, John W. Hinckley, and even...