About this item
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 KatrinaLandfall has at its center a president whose high-speed shifts between charm and petulance, resoluteness and self-pity, continually energize and mystify those around him--including his acerbic and crafty mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush; the desperately correct but occasionally unbuttoned Condoleezza Rice; the gnomic and manipulative Donald Rumsfeld; and the caustic observer Ann Richards (Bush's predecessor as governor of Texas) . 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.The story is deepened and driven by 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 true believer and 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.Landfall is the culmination of a contemporary epic whose previous volumes (Watergate and Finale) have been repeatedly singled out as outstanding novels of the years in which they appeared.
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.
