Ward Just: 11 books

A New York Times Notable Book: “An elegantly written, strikingly intelligent novel” about wrestling with the past and the future in a reunified Germany (Newsday). Shot in Germany in the late 1960s, Dix Greenwood’s first film, Summer, 1921, is revered as an antiwar classic. Thirty years...

This family saga from a National Book Award finalist is a “brilliantly orchestrated tale of several generations of Washington, D.C., insiders” (Booklist). In this epic and acutely observed novel, three generations of a family of Washington power brokers vie for influence over the fate of...

"The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago." So begins Ward Just's An Unfinished Season, the winter in question a postwar moment of the 1950s when the modern world lay just over the horizon, a time of rabid anticommunism, worker...

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...

Well-meaning American civilians make an attempt at nation-building during the Vietnam War, in this “powerful” novel by a National Book Award finalist (Newsweek). Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Time and the Los Angeles Times In this “extraordinary,” beautifully constructed...

Jonathan Yardley called A Family Trust "his longest, his most ambitious and his best… a book with serious purposes that manages to entertain at the same time…rich in carefully observed details, in quick, sharp perceptions that reveal more than one at first understands…a fine, satisfying, rewarding...

A “beguiling and unnerving” novel of a young man haunted by an act of violence, from the award-winning author of An Unfinished Season (Booklist, starred review).   As a small-town boy in the early twentieth century, Lee Goodell learned about a brutal crime—and the efforts of his father, a judge,...

“A gripping international thriller” about a Foreign Service officer—and the son who turns to terrorism to spite him (Los Angeles Times). William North Jr. inherited his father’s keen political instincts and passion for justice. But the last time Ambassador North saw his son he seemed...

Thomas Railles, an American expatriate and former “odd-jobber” for the CIA, is a successful painter living with his beloved wife, Florette, in a small village in the Pyrenees. On an ordinary autumn day, Florette goes for a walk in the hills and is killed by unknown assailants. Was her death simply...

A novel about journalism and one man’s moral choices, “evoking the rhythms of Ernest Hemingway’s early fiction . . . A quietly affecting, mournful achievement” (Richmond Times-Dispatch).   Ned Ayres has never wanted anything but a newspaper career. His defining moment comes early, when...

A young diplomat is torn between two women during the earliest days of the Vietnam War in this “wide-ranging and well-written” novel (The Christian Science Monitor). Harry Sanders is a young Foreign Service officer in 1960s Indochina when the course of his life is suddenly altered by a...