"A compact masterpiece dedicated to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich--Julian Barnes's first novel since his best-selling, Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending. 1936: Shostakovich, just thirty, fears for his livelihood and his life. Stalin, hitherto a distant figure, has taken a sudden interest in his work and denounced his latest opera. Now, certain he will be exiled to Siberia (or, more likely, shot dead on the spot), he reflects on...

"In a gripping World War II mystery set in Washington, D.C., a young naval intelligence officer goes undercover to solve a murder and prevent the Soviets from stealing the secrets of America's atomic bomb project. Washington D.C., 1945. Victory in the war looms, but a new fear transfixes the wartime capital. Fear of communist spies and the atomic secrets they covet. When the corpse of a Navy Intelligence officer is found on a cobblestone back alley,...

"A teenage girl living in 1960s China becomes Mao Zedong's protégée and lover--and a poster child for the Cultural Revolution--in this provocative, poignant novel from the bestselling author of A River of Stars On the eve of China's Cultural Revolution and her sixteenth birthday, Mei dreams of becoming a model revolutionary. When the Communist Party recruits girls for a mysterious duty in the capital, she seizes the opportunity to escape her impoverished...

An adventure spanning three decades, America is driven to the brink of financial ruin by a Soviet conspiracy. Simple plot: launch a banking revolution that will carry within it the seeds of crisis and collapse. The code name is Ropespinnger.

"Michael Cassidy, a New York cop plagued by dreams that sometimes come true, escorts a prisoner accused of murder to Havana on the cusp of Fidel Castro's successful revolution against the Batista dictatorship. After delivering the man to La Cabana prison and rescuing Dylan McCue, a Russian KGB agent and his now-married former lover, from her scheduled execution, Cassidy returns to New York and retreats into the comforts of alcohol and sex. The arrival...

This novel, based on the author's own stressful experiences at the New Playwrights Theatre in New York City and in Hollywood, concerns a playwright-turned-screenwriter who falls under the influence of the Communist Party. The satirical work conveys Dos Passos's suspicions about Communist infiltration in the American artistic community.

"Through the life of a remarkable woman--based on pioneering stage director Sun Weishi (1921-1968)--this epic novel immerses us in the multifaceted history of China's Communist Party. Sun Weishi was educated in Moscow and when she returned to China she produced the works of Chekov, Gogol, and other socially progressive dramas. However, when the cultural revolution began in 1966, she was persecuted, arrested, and eventually died in prison."--

"In the spring of 1956, a young American photographer falls in love with a Cuban line cook in New York. They have a ten-week affair which ends when Immigration arrests and deports him, and by then Clare Miller is pregnant. Few Americans know the name Camilo Cienfuegos. All Cubans do. He was the most charismatic of Castro's rebel commanders. But Clare, who never hears from him after he's deported, believes he has died in Fidel's invasion of the island....

This novel, the author's masterpiece, is one of the greatest expressions ever of the tortured intersection of political and personal destinies in Eastern Europe. Futuristic, experimental, and remarkably prophetic, the book traces the adventures of a young Pole whose own fate parallels the collapse of Western civilization following a Chinese communist invasion from the East. Written in 1927, Witkiewicz's novel presages the horrifying anti-utopian society...