Exiles in the Garden

Book excerpt: A “fascinatingly readable” novel that ponders “where the personal becomes the political or if it is possible to maintain a distinction at all” (Miami Herald). In his fifty-four years in the US Senate, Kim Malone made a difference. Emulating FDR, he advocated and agitated, fighting for the ideals in which he believed. His son, Alec, however, was a different story—one Kim thinks on as he lies on his deathbed, with only the prodigal Alec for company. Eschewing his congressional heritage for a career as a newspaper photographer and distancing himself even further from politics by refusing to cover the Vietnam War, Alec has seemed to live a never-ending series of misadventures, complete with a failed marriage and a floundering vocation. So when his long-absent father-in-law, an antifascist commando from Czechoslovakia, appears on his doorstep, Alec finds himself confronting uncomfortable truths about his life, his choices, and the pasts of those surrounding him. Ward Just has been praised as “one of the most astute writers of American fiction,” and Exiles in the Garden stands as one of his most challenging, insightful, and compulsively readable works—an examination of personal morality, American politics, and the universal desires that bind us all (The New York Times Book Review).