About this item
A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-DispatchAdding to a fiction chronicle that has already spanned American history from the Lincoln assassination to the Watergate scandal, Thomas Mallon now brings to life the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president in modern times. Finale 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. 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, Jr. (Reagan's would-be assassin) , and even Bette Davis, with whom the president had long ago appeared onscreen. Several figures - including a humbled, crafty Richard Nixon; the young, brilliantly acerbic Christopher Hitchens; and an anxious, astrology-dependent Nancy Reagan (on the verge of a terrible realization) - become the eyes through which readers see the last convulsions of the Cold War, the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and a political revolution. At the center of it all - but forever out of reach - is Ronald Reagan himself, whose genial remoteness confounds his subordinates, his children, and the citizens who elected him. Finale is the book that Thomas Mallon's work has been building toward for years. It is the most entertaining and panoramic novel about American politics since Advise and Consent, more than a half century ago.
About the Author
Thomas Mallon is a novelist, critic and director of the creative writing program at The George Washington University. He attended Brown University as an undergraduate and earned a Master of Arts and a Ph. D. from Harvard. He received the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1994 and won a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1987. Mallon taught English at Vassar College from 1979-1991. Mallon is the author of the novels , and most recently s; as well as writing four works of nonfiction. He is a former literary editor of GQ, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column for ten years, and has contributed frequently to, and . He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and became Director of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2004. He then served as Deputy Chairman of the NEH. He lives in Foggy Bottom, a neighborhood in Washington, DC.
