Back Channel

Summary

October 1962. The SovietUnion has smuggled missiles into Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev are in the midstof a military face-off that could lead to nuclear conflagration. Warships andsubmarines are on the move. Planes are in the air. Troops are at the ready.Both leaders are surrounded by advisers clamoring for war. The only way for thetwo leaders to negotiate safely is to open a “back channel”—a surreptitiouspath of communication hidden from their own people. They need a clandestineemissary nobody would ever suspect. If the secret gets out, her life will be atrisk … but they’re careful not to tell her that.

Stephen L. Carter’s grippingnew novel, Back Channel, is abrilliant amalgam of fact and fiction—a suspenseful retelling of the CubanMissile Crisis, in which the fate of the world rests unexpectedly on theshoulders of a young college student.

On the island of Curaçao, avisiting Soviet chess champion whispers state secrets to an Americanacquaintance.

In the Atlantic Ocean, afreighter struggles through a squall while trying to avoid surveillance.

And in Ithaca, New York,Margo Jensen, one of the few black women at Cornell, is asked to go to EasternEurope to babysit a madman.

As the clock ticks towardWorld War III, Margo undertakes her harrowing journey. Pursued by the hawks onboth sides, protected by nothing but her own ingenuity and courage, Margo isdrawn ever more deeply into the crossfire—and into her own family’s hidden past.