Watergate
“In this stealth bull’s-eye of a political novel, Thomas Mallon invests the Watergate affair with all the glitter, glamour, suave grace, and subtlety that it doesn’t often get. His cleverly counterintuitive Watergate even has the name-dropping panache of a Hollywood tell-all...[and a] fine, boisterous historical tableau...Readers who deem the book’s liberties too free can stick to the tonnage of Watergate memoirs, transcripts, investigative, and marginalia. More fun-loving types can take Watergate as lively, witty drama.”
New York Times
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist for Fiction
A New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books Pick
From one of our most esteemed historical novelists comes 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 of the scandal's greatest mysteries-who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?-and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety.
In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now.
Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his "splendid evocation of Washington," Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy which surpasses even that attained in his previous novels and turns a "third-rate burglary" into tumultuous, first-rate entertainment.
Praise