Ward Just Books In Order

Novels

  1. A Soldier of the Revolution (1970)
  2. Stringer (1974)
  3. Nicholson At Large (1975)
  4. A Family Trust (1978)
  5. In the City of Fear (1983)
  6. The American Blues (1984)
  7. The American Ambassador (1987)
  8. Jack Gance (1988)
  9. The Translator (1991)
  10. Ambition & Love (1994)
  11. Echo House (1997)
  12. A Dangerous Friend (1999)
  13. The Weather in Berlin (2002)
  14. An Unfinished Season (2004)
  15. Forgetfulness (2006)
  16. Exiles in the Garden (2009)
  17. Rodin’s Debutante (2011)
  18. American Romantic (2014)
  19. The Eastern Shore (2016)

Collections

  1. The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert (1973)
  2. Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, and The Love of Women (1979)
  3. Twenty-one (1980)
  4. Lowell Limpett (2001)

Non fiction

  1. To What End (1968)
  2. Military Men (1970)

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Ward Just Books Overview

A Soldier of the Revolution

Ward Just took time off from the editorial page of The Washington Post to write his first novel, A Soldier of the Revolution, the story of a young man who is sent to South America to work for an American corporation and finds himself drawn into a local insurgency movement. Michael Reardon, easygoing and contemplative, pas*ses his days in the high plateau of a South American country gathering information that disappears into the maw of a cosmetics company’s scholarly foundation. His slow, easy, and aimless life is interrupted when he is kidnapped by a ragtag bunch of guerillas who plan to hijack the local radio station and broadcast to the local Indians news of the impending revolution. All of the hallmarks and concerns of Just’s fiction are evident in A Soldier of the Revolution. The nature of integrity, the American imperial experience, and the often curious circumstances of fate are all addressed in Just’s intelligent, graceful style.

A Family Trust

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 book, the work of a mature and accomplished novelist,’ upon the book’s initial publication in 1978. The passing of Amos Rising, town elder and editor of The Dement Intelligencer, leaves the Rising family without a patriarch and the town with a hole in its center. The ambitions and talents of the Risings, the changing face of the town and the life of the spirited, intelligent, and attractive Dana Rising fill the pages of this extraordinary novel. Ward Just’s A Family Trust is about the public face and private souls of America’s Heartland in the same way his other novels are about Germany, Vietnam, or Washington D.C. The time has come to bring A Family Trust back into print.

In the City of Fear

‘Not many people can write splendid fiction about the inner workings of the American political state. In fact, Ward Just is the only one i can think of.’ Boston Globe In this novel of political intrigue, Pulitzer Prize finalist Ward Just captures the best and brightest of Washington amid turmoil of the sixties and its repercussions twenty years later. In the City of Fear follows the intersecting lives of a good congressman, his good wife, and the good wife’s lover, an infantry colonel whose memories of the war, and a secret plot concocted by the Washington power brokers to win it, are more than he can bear.

The American Ambassador

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. William North is a Foreign Service officer who fiercely loves his family and his country. His son, brilliant and thoroughly disaffected, sees his father as the embodiment of all that is corrupt in Western democracies. When the younger North aligns himself with a German terrorist organization, the conflict between father and son escalates to a matter of national security. In this breathtaking novel, Ward Just takes us inside the mind of a terrorist, revealing the eerie logic at work there.

Jack Gance

A young pollster named Jack Gance becomes a savvy Washington political insider and eventually a U.S. senator but not without paying the usual dues, which turns out to be a dirty business. Gance wastes his love on married women, but ultimately learns who his true mistress is: ‘I had arrived an apprentice from Chicago, but Washington had taken care of that. It was a great city…
. It gave and gave and gave and gave and expected nothing in return but loyalty.’

The Translator

Sydney Van Damm loves living among foreigners: having escaped Germany and his boyhood memories of World War II, he makes a life as a translator in Paris. There he meets Angela, an American expatriate who becomes his wife. Their marriage is brushed by tragedy, and in the turbulent seventies and eighties, as the new Europe is born, Sydney gets involved in an East German scam that comes crashing down around him.

Echo House

Here is Just’s masterpiece an epic chronicle of three generations of Washington power brokers and the womenfolk who loved them except when they didn’t. The Washington Post described this book as ‘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.’

A Dangerous Friend

In this, his twelfth novel, Ward Just penetrates more deeply into America’s role in the world than he has ever done before. This beautifully constructed large canvas novel of Saigon in 1965 can be justly compared to Joseph Conrad’s NOSTROMO or Graham Greene’s THE QUIET AMERICAN. A Dangerous Friend is a thrilling narrative roiling with intrigue, mayhem, and betrayal. Here is the story of conscience and its consequences among those for whom Vietnam was neither the right fight nor the wrong fight but the only fight. The exotic tropical surroundings, the coarsening and corrupting effects of a colonial regime, the visionary delusions of the American democratizers, all play their part. In A Dangerous Friend, a few civilians with bright minds and sunny intentions want to reform Vietnam but the Vietnam they see isn’t the Vietnam that is. Sydney Parade, a political scientist, has left home and family in an effort to become part of something larger than himself, a foreign aid operation in Saigon. Even before he arrives, he encounters French and Americans who reveal to him the unsettling depths of a conflict he thought he understood 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.

The Weather in Berlin

For decades, film director Dixon Greenwood has lived the Hollywood life the studio intrigues, the abrupt rise and fall of careers, grand aspirations come and gone. Dix’s own fame rests on his one great work, SUMMER, 1921, an antiwar classic that has become a cult film. Now he believes he has lost his imagination and genius for reading the times. His audience has vanished. So, on a kind of personal rescue mission, he embarks on a three month journey to Germany, the birthplace, as he sees it, of the twentieth century. In postwar, post Wall Berlin, Dix finds the winter skies gray and the cultural climate turbulent. While fellow artists debate politics and art, he discovers that a nostalgic Prussian costume drama is the most popular program on German television. With decidedly mixed feelings, he agrees to direct an episode a fateful decision that unexpectedly reunites him with an actress who disappeared from the set of SUMMER, 1921 thirty years before. Their final collaboration takes Dix into the heart of the German century and back to his own imagination. The Weather in Berlin showcases Ward Just’s unmatched eye for restless Americans abroad. Imbued with the glitter and darkness of both old Hollywood and the new Europe, it is a terrifically atmospheric novel by ‘one of the most astute writers of American fiction’ New York Times Book Review.

An Unfinished Season

‘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 unrest, and government corruption. Even the small town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of ‘the enemy within.’ In rural Quarterday, on the margins of Chicago’s North Shore, nineteen year old Wilson Ravan watches as his father’s life unravels. Teddy Ravan gruff, unapproachable, secure in his knowledge of the world is confronting a strike and even death threats from union members who work at his printing business. Wilson, in the summer before college, finds himself straddling three worlds when he takes a job at a newspaper: the newsroom where working class reporters find class struggle at the heart of every issue, the glittering North Shore debutante parties where he spends his nights, and the growing cold war between his parents at home. These worlds collide when he falls in love with the headstrong daughter of a renowned psychiatrist with a frightful past in World War II. Tragedy strikes her family, and the revelation of secrets calls into question everything Wilson once believed. From a distinguished chronicler of American social history and the political world, An Unfinished Season is a brilliant exploration of culture, politics, and the individual conscience.

Forgetfulness

From one of our most critically acclaimed authors comes a masterly story of terrorism and revenge and one man’s attempts to extricate himself from his past.

Thomas Railles, an American expatriate and former ‘odd-jobber’ for the CIA, is a respected painter living with his beloved wife, Florette, in the south of France. On an ordinary autumn day, Florette goes for a walk in the hills and is killed by unknown assailants. Her death devastates Thomas, and in the weeks and months that follow he struggles to make sense of a world that seems defined by violence and pain.

Each night Thomas tracks the war in Iraq on the evening news while Florette’s killers remain at large. When French officials detain four Moroccan terrorists and charge them with Florette’s murder, Thomas is invited to witness the interrogation. The experience completely undoes him, changing his world utterly, and he finds himself unable to remain at a distance from America, the country he left so long ago.

Ward Just’s most gripping and insightful novel yet, Forgetfulness is a haunting depiction of the corrosive effects of today’s war on terror and its unexpected consequences for the individual conscience.

Exiles in the Garden

‘One of the most astute writers of American fiction’ New York Times Book Review delivers the resonant story of Alec Malone, a senator’s son who rejects the family business of politics for a career as a newspaper photographer. Alec and his Swiss wife, Lucia, settle in Georgetown next door to a couple whose migr gatherings in their garden remind Lucia of all the things Americans are not. She leaves Alec as his career founders on his refusal of an assignment to cover the Vietnam War a slyly subversive fictional choice from Ward Just, who was himself a renowned war correspondent. At the center of the novel is Alec s unforeseen reckoning with Lucia s long absent father, Andre Duran, a Czech living out the end of his life in a hostel called Goya House. Duran s career as an adventurer and antifascist commando is everything Alec s is not. The encounter forces Alec to confront just how different a life where things ‘terrible things, terrible things’ happen is from a life where nothing much happens at all. Once again, ‘Ward Just writes the kind of books they say no one writes anymore: smart, well crafted narratives wise to the ways of the world that use fiction to show us how we live’ Joseph Kanon, Los Angeles Times.

Rodin’s Debutante

Tommy Ogden, a Gatsbyesque character living in a mansion outside robber baron era Chicago, declines to give his wife the money to commission a bust of herself from the French master Rodin and announces instead his intention to endow a boys school. Ogden’s decision reverberates years later in the life of Lee Goodell, whose coming of age is at the heart of Ward Just s emotionally potent new novel. Lee s life decisions to become a sculptor, to sojourn in the mean streets of the South Side, to marry into the haute intellectual culture of Hyde Park play out against the crude glamour of midcentury Chicago. Just s signature skill of conveying emotional heft with few words is put into play as Lee confronts the meaning of his four years at Ogden Hall School under the purview, in the school library, of a bust known as Rodin s Debutante. And, especially, as he meets again a childhood friend, the victim of a brutal sexual assault of which she has no memory. It was a crime marking the end of Lee s boyhood and the beginning of his understanding so powerfully under the surface of Just s masterly story that how and what we remember add up to nothing less than our very lives.

The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert

This masterly volume comprises the best shorter fiction written by Just over the last 25 years. ‘The working life, the war, politics, love affairs, and marriage seem to be the waters in which my boats set sail,’ Just writes. Here is a generous selection of the work that has earned Just his reputation as ‘one of the most astute writers of American fiction.’

Lowell Limpett

The acclaimed author of A Dangerous Friend explores his signture concerns the moral dilemmas of journalism, law, and public life, and the limits of love in a new play and previously uncollected fiction. Lowell Limpett is a journalist at the end of his career. He addresses the reader in a voice that is melancholy, honest, and wonderfully, comfortably compelling about the beauty of a clean lead, the death of old friends, and what we read when we read the news. Two stories, both previously uncollected, will follow Lowell Limpett. The issues of work, love, and duty to the self are addressed as only Ward Just could in the three pieces. In a new foreword, Just discusses the new for him experience of writing a play and the process of compiling this new collection.

To What End

As a young man, Ward Just spent eighteen months in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Washington Post. The experience would earn him both a citation from the Overseas Press Club and a Combat Infantryman’s Badge awarded by the commander of the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, and would serve as subject matter for decades of writing and many acclaimed, bestselling novels. The experience also inspired his very first book: a vivid, personal evocation of the atmosphere, the politics, and the moral dilemmas of Vietnam at the height of American involvement. Neither a polemic nor an apologia, To What End was the very first book published to ask the question: What are we doing here? It offers a morally ambiguous view of the war that was radical in its day and still bears the sting of truth: ‘The war hypnotized,’ he writes, ‘and those whose business it was to observe it came to regard it as a drama whose characters and plot were only dimly perceived. ‘In a foreword to the new PublicAffairs edition, Just reflects on Vietnam, on himself as a young man, and on how his views have and haven’t changed since he wrote this sharply observed, sad, beautiful, and still disturbing book. A rediscovered classic of the Vietnam War, published for the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon For veterans of the war and of the times and for readers of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, Neil Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie, Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, and Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War Readers of Just’s novels will be fascinated by his journalistic treatment of the subject that became his lifelong preoccupation in fiction

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