The Plot Against America

The Innocent is another action-packed thriller from David Baldacci, one of the world’s most popular writers.

HE COULD NO LONGER REMEMBER THE NAMES OF ALL THE PEOPLE WHOSE LIVES HE HAD ENDED.

Master assassin Will Robie is the man the US government call to eliminate their most ruthless enemies at home or abroad. He never questions his orders, and he never misses his mark.

He’s just returned from a covert assignment in Edinburgh to neutralize a growing threat, having drawn upon all his expertise to complete his mission and disappear without a trace. The odds were stacked against him, but that’s never made a difference before.

But now he’s facing the most difficult operation of his career. Dispatched to kill a US government employee, he does the unthinkable when things don’t add up – he refuses to pull the trigger. In doing so, Robie finds himself becoming the target. On the run from his own government and with everything on the line, does he need to change sides to save lives – including his own?

The Innocent is the first novel in David Baldacci’s blockbuster Will Robie series.

This extraordinary magnum opus seems at first to be a confessional autobiographical novel in the grand manner, claiming and extending the legacy of Proust and Mann. But it is more: Peter Nadas has given us a superb contemporary psychological novel that comes to terms with the ghosts, corpses, and repressed nightmares of Europe’s recent past. “A Book of Memories” is made up of three first-person narratives: the first that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator’s adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once-upper-class but now pro-Communist family and of his beloved but repudiated father, a state prosecutor who commits suicide after the 1956 uprising. A second memoir, alternating with the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator’s own experiences. A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator’s return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account of their friendship. Together these brilliantly colored lives are integrated in a powerful work of tragic intensity.

Lit follows Mary Karr’s descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness – and her astonishing resurrection. Karr’s longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting poet produces a son they adore. But she can’t outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in “The Mental Marriott” awakens her to the possibility of joy, and leads her to an unlikely faith.

Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. It is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up – as only Mary Karr can tell it.