<div>In this anthology, uncover a century of dark mystery stories set in America’s mighty capital. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of city-based noir anthologies launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book is compromised of stories set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city in the book. The original D.C. Noir, a groundbreaking collection of new fiction by sixteen different writers, displayed the curatorial prowess of bestselling author George Pelecanos. In D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, Pelecanos once again assembles an enchanting array of dark and subversive stories, this time selecting the very best of Washington’s historical literary legacy. Classic reprints from: Edward P. Jones, George Pelecanos, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, James Grady, Julian Mayfield, Marita Golden, Elizabeth Hand, Julian Mazor, Ward Just, Jean Toomer, Roach Brown, Larry Neal, and others. Praise for D.C. Noir 2 “By broadly interpreting what constitutes noir, Pelecanos has been able to include writers as diverse as Langston Hughes and Ward Just in this high-quality reprint anthology. In his introduction, Pelecanos describes his vision of “a century-long overview of D.C. fiction that would focus on issues of race, ethnicity, politics, class, and the attendant struggles and changes that occurred in various eras of our history.” —Publishers Weekly</div>

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D.C. Noir 2

<div>A young man comes of age in Eisenhower-era Chicago in this “stunning” Pulitzer Prize Finalist novel by the author of Echo House (USA Today). In An Unfinished Season, Ward Just evokes a city, an epoch, and a shift in ideals through the story of nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan. In his summer before college, Wils finds himself straddling three worlds: the working-class newsroom where he’s landed a coveted job as a rookie reporter, the whirl of glittering North Shore debutante parties where he spends his nights, and the growing cold war between his parents at home. With unparalleled grace and incisive observation, Just brings Wils’s circle to radiant life. Through his finely wrought portraits of a father and son, young lovers, and newsroom dramas, Just also stirringly captures a seismic shift in American political life. WINNER OF THE HEARTLAND PRIZE FOR FICTION “A master American novelist.” —Vanity Fair</div>

An Unfinished Season

<div>Thomas Railles, an American expatriate and former &#8220;odd-jobber&#8221; 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 case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or was it somehow connected to Thomas&#8217;s work with the CIA? When French officials detain four Moroccan terrorists and charge them with Florette&#8217;s murder, Thomas is invited by his boyhood friend (and former agency handler) Bernhard to witness the interrogation. Thomas's search for answers in this shadow world will lead him to a confrontation that will change him forever.</div>

Forgetfulness

<div>This family saga from a National Book Award finalist is a &ldquo;brilliantly orchestrated tale of several generations of Washington, D.C., insiders&rdquo; (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 nation. In the 1930s, Sen. Adolph Behl and his wife, Constance, buy historic mansion Echo House with the vision of transforming it into Washington&rsquo;s greatest salon&mdash;an auspicious base camp from which the senator can launch his &ldquo;final ascent,&rdquo; and son Axel can prepare his first. Across decades of secrets, betrayals, victories, and humiliations, the Behl family will fight to remain near the center, and behind the scenes, of American political power&mdash;from the New Deal to Watergate and beyond. &ldquo;A fascinating if ultimately painful fairy tale, complete with . . . a family curse . . . The decline of the Behls represents the decline of Washington from the bright dawn of the American century into the gathering shadows of an alien new millennium.&rdquo; &mdash;The Washington Post &ldquo;Puts the standard run-of-the-mill Washington novel to shame . . . It is Mr. Just&rsquo;s intimate portrait of the city that makes his book so convincing.&rdquo; &mdash;TheNew York Times &ldquo;Will be read in a century&rsquo;s time by anyone seeking to understand how we lived.&rdquo; &mdash;Detroit Free Press &ldquo;[Ward&rsquo;s] stories put him in the category reserved for writers who work far beyond the fashions of the times. . . . Masterpieces of balance, focus, and hidden order.&rdquo; &mdash;Chicago Tribune &ldquo;He has earned a place on the shelf just below Edith Wharton and Henry James.&rdquo; &mdash;Newsweek</div>

Echo House

<div>Well-meaning American civilians make an attempt at nation-building during the Vietnam War, in this &ldquo;powerful&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;extraordinary,&rdquo; beautifully constructed large-canvas novel of Saigon in 1965, Ward Just takes a penetrating look into America&rsquo;s role in the world (The New York Times). Sydney Parade, a political scientist, has left his home and family in an effort to become part of something larger than himself, a foreign aid operation in the South Vietnamese capital. Even before he arrives, he encounters French and Americans who reveal to him the unsettling depths of a conflict he thought he understood&mdash;and in Saigon, the Vietnamese add yet another dimension. Before long, the rampant missteps and misplaced ideals trap Parade and others in a moral crossfire. &ldquo;Emotionally wrenching and always beautifully observant,&rdquo; this is a story of conscience and its consequences among those for whom Vietnam was neither the right fight nor the wrong fight but the only fight (Entertainment Weekly). The exotic tropical surroundings, coarsening and corrupting effects of a colonial regime, and visionary delusions of the American democratizers all play their part. &ldquo;A literary triumph that transcends its war story&rdquo; and a New York Times Notable Book, A Dangerous Friend can be justly compared to Joseph Conrad&rsquo;s Nostromo or Graham Greene&rsquo;s The Quiet American&mdash;a thrilling narrative roiling with intrigue, mayhem, and betrayal (San Francisco Chronicle). &ldquo;Makes you want to run screaming into the street to protest retrospectively the war he has so movingly recreated.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times</div>

A Dangerous Friend

<div>A New York Times Notable Book: &ldquo;An elegantly written, strikingly intelligent novel&rdquo; about wrestling with the past and the future in a reunified Germany (Newsday). Shot in Germany in the late 1960s, Dix Greenwood&rsquo;s first film, Summer, 1921, is revered as an antiwar classic. Thirty years later and after more than a decade of silence, Dix returns to Berlin on a residency that he hopes will rekindle his genius. He encounters a newly reunited Germany, full of promise yet mired in the past&mdash;much like Dix himself. To this day, he is haunted by the mystery of Jana Sorb, the actress who disappeared during the making of Summer, 1921 and has long since been presumed dead. When Jana suddenly reappears in Dix&rsquo;s life, it sets off a cascade of recollections and realizations that will forever change the way he approaches his art . . . and his life. In this tale of Americans abroad, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Ward Just turns his keen eye toward the dark underpinnings of nationalism, fame, and artistic integrity, in &ldquo;an elegantly written, strikingly intelligent novel, as knowing about movies, the German enigma, and the vagaries of fame as it is about matters of the heart&rdquo; (Newsday). &ldquo;Ward Just writes the kind of books they say no one writes anymore: smart, well-crafted narratives&mdash;wise to the ways of the world&mdash;that use fiction to show us how we live.&rdquo; &mdash;Los Angeles Times &ldquo;Every so often, a well-established, respected novelist vaults to a new level, demonstrating a mastery of craft that startles even his fans. That&rsquo;s what Ward Just has done in . . . &lsquo;The Weather in Berlin.&rsquo;&rdquo; &mdash;Newsweek</div>

The Weather in Berlin

<div>A &ldquo;fascinatingly readable&rdquo; novel that ponders &ldquo;where the personal becomes the political or if it is possible to maintain a distinction at all&rdquo; (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&mdash;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 &ldquo;one of the most astute writers of American fiction,&rdquo; and Exiles in the Garden stands as one of his most challenging, insightful, and compulsively readable works&mdash;an examination of personal morality, American politics, and the universal desires that bind us all (The New York Times Book Review).</div>

Exiles in the Garden

<div>&ldquo;A gripping international thriller&rdquo; about a Foreign Service officer&mdash;and the son who turns to terrorism to spite him (Los Angeles Times). William North Jr. inherited his father&rsquo;s keen political instincts and passion for justice. But the last time Ambassador North saw his son he seemed like a stranger&mdash;and a hostile one at that. Now, just as North prepares to take a new post in Germany, reports emerge that Bill Jr. is aligned with a German terrorist organization. Suddenly, a private conflict between father and son escalates to a matter of national security. North is faced with a terrifying dilemma as loyalty to family and country are directly at odds. The American Ambassador is at once a riveting tale of suspense and a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of Western values in an age of terrorism. &ldquo;Haunting and persuasive . . . Charged with authenticity . . . A splendid book that is both thoughtful and fast-moving.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times &ldquo;To make out the jagged intersections of ambition and greed, idealism and sell-out in contemporary politics, you need only turn to . . . The American Ambassador.&rdquo; &mdash;Salon.com</div>

The American Ambassador

<div>A &ldquo;beguiling and unnerving&rdquo; 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&mdash;and the efforts of his father, a judge, to help cover it up. Lee would go on to attend a private boys&rsquo; school, become a sculptor, become familiar with both Chicago&rsquo;s gritty South Side and its wealthy, intellectual Hyde Park, and get married. But it is his reunion with a girl from his childhood, a victim of a sexual assault she cannot remember, that will spur him to contemplate the event that marked the end of his boyhood and the beginning of his understanding of the world, in this sprawling, powerful novel by &ldquo;one of the most accomplished and admirable American writers&rdquo; (The Washington Post Book World). &ldquo;An achievement . . . [that] fuses the romanticism of the early Kerouac and his mentor, Thomas Wolfe, with the wry humor of Richard Yates.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times Book Review &ldquo;Rodin&rsquo;s Debutante is a surprising story, never going where you expect it to, and Just&rsquo;s spare prose packs a solid emotional punch.&rdquo; &mdash;Entertainment Weekly</div>

Rodin's Debutante

<div>A novel about journalism and one man&rsquo;s moral choices, &ldquo;evoking the rhythms of Ernest Hemingway&rsquo;s early fiction . . . A quietly affecting, mournful achievement&rdquo; (Richmond Times-Dispatch). Ned Ayres has never wanted anything but a newspaper career. His defining moment comes early, when Ned is city editor of his hometown paper. One of his beat reporters fields a tip: William Grant, the town haberdasher, married to the bank president&rsquo;s daughter and the father of two children, once served six years in Joliet. The story runs&mdash;Ned offers no resistance to his publisher&rsquo;s argument that the public has a right to know. The consequences, swift and shocking, haunt him throughout a long career&mdash;until eventually, as the editor of a major newspaper in post-Kennedy Washington, DC, Ned has reason to return to the question of privacy and its many violations. </div>

The Eastern Shore

<div>A young diplomat is torn between two women during the earliest days of the Vietnam War in this &ldquo;wide-ranging and well-written&rdquo; 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 dangerous and clandestine meeting with insurgents that ends in quiet disaster&mdash;and a brief but passionate encounter with Sieglinde, a young German woman. Absorbing the impact of his misstep, Harry returns briefly to Washington before traveling to Africa, Scandinavia, and the Mediterranean on assignments. He marries the captivating May, who is fleeing her own family disappointments in New England and looking for an escape into Harry&rsquo;s diplomatic life. On the surface, they are a handsome, successful couple&mdash;but the memory of Sieglinde persists in Harry&rsquo;s thoughts, and May has her own secrets too. As Harry navigates the increasingly treacherous waters of diplomacy in an age of interminable conflict, he also tries to narrow the distance between himself and the two alluring women who have chosen to love him, in a novel from a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist that &ldquo;considers the toll that a life lived upon the great stage of international politics can take on a man of substance&rdquo; (Kirkus Reviews). </div>

Ward Just
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Books By Ward Just (10 Books)

An Unfinished Season

Forgetfulness

Echo House

A Dangerous Friend

The Weather in Berlin

Exiles in the Garden

The American Ambassador

Rodin's Debutante

The Eastern Shore

American Romantic

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Ward JustFollow this author