Douglas Kennedy Books In Order

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Dead Heart (1995)
  2. The Big Picture (1997)
  3. The Job (1998)
  4. The Pursuit of Happiness (2001)
  5. Temptation (2002)
  6. A Special Relationship (2003)
  7. State of the Union (2005)
  8. The Woman in the Fifth (2007)
  9. Leaving the World (2009)
  10. The Moment (2011)
  11. Five Days (2012)
  12. The Blue Hour (2015)
  13. The Heat of Betrayal (2015)
  14. The Great Wide Open (2019)
  15. Isabelle in the Afternoon (2020)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. The Christmas Ring (2011)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Beyond The Pyramids (1988)
  2. In God’s Country (1989)
  3. Chasing Mammon (1992)

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Douglas Kennedy Books Overview

The Dead Heart

‘That dumbsh*it map. I’d been seduced by it. Seduced by its possibilities. That map had brought me here…
That map had been a serious mistake’ The map in question is of Australia, stumbled across in a second hand bookshop by American journalist Nick Hawthorne, en route to another dead end hack job in Akron, Ohio. Seduced by all that wilderness, all that NOTHING, Nick decides to put his midlife crisis on hold and light out to the ultimate nowheresville where a chance encounter throws him into a sun baked orgy of surf, sex and swill, and a nightmare from which there is no escape. ‘Douglas Kennedy might never be allowed into Australia again. This is a crazy, compulsive ultimately serious thriller and a bravura fictional debut from one of our best travel writers’ Philip Kerr

The Big Picture

On the face of it, Ben Bradford is your standard Wall Street hot shot Junior partner in a legal firm, 6 figure income, wife and two young kids straight out of a Gap catalogue. But along with the WASP lifestyle comes the sting Ben hates it. He wants has always wanted to be a photographer. When he discovers his wife is playing outside the ground, the conseqences of a moment of madness force him to question not just the design of his life but the price of fulfiment. Because finding yourself means nothing when you’re pretending to be someone else. From the picket fences of yuppie New England to Montana’s untouchable splendour, The Big Picture spans states and states of mind in a thrilling novel of genuine originality.

The Job

THE PAY WAS GOOD. THE PRICE WAS MURDER. Ned Allen is a young, upwardly mobile ad salesman for a successful computer magazine. Several years into his career, he’s confident that he’s finally left his small town roots behind, and that the sophisticated Manhattan world he covets is his forever. His wife, Lizzie, is also flourishing at a prestigious public relations firm. Life, it seems, is just where they want it until Ned is faced with a seemingly clearcut moral choice that pulls the bottom out from under his feet. Ned’s company is sold and his world is suddenly turned upside down. Salvation appears in the unlikely form of an old high school friend who is working for lack Ballantine, a former real estate tycoon with a shady past who has recently made a much heralded comeback. When, against his better judgement, Ned accepts a job working for Ballantine’s latest venture, an offshore private equity fund, he tells himself it’s just another job. But it turns out that Ballantine has other uses for Ned…
. An adrenaline pumping thriller, The Job is destined to catapult Kennedy into the ranks of bestsellers like Grisham and Turow.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Manhattan, Thanksgiving eve, 1945. The war is over, and Eric Smythe’s party was in full swing. All his clever Greenwich Village friends were there. So too was his sister Sara, an independent, outspoken young woman, starting to make her way in the big city. And then in walked Jack Malone, a U.S. Army journalist just back from a defeated Germany, a man whose world view was vastly different than that of Eric and his friends. This chance meeting between Sara and Jack and the choices they both made in the wake of it would eventually have profound consequences, both for themselves and for those closest to them for decades afterwards. Set amidst the dynamic optimism of postwar New York and the subsequent nightmare of the McCarthy era, The Pursuit of Happiness is a great, tragic love story; a tale of divided loyalties, decisive moral choices and the random workings of destiny.

Temptation

Like all Hollywood screenwriters, David Armitage wants to be rich and famous. But for the past eleven years, he’s tasted nothing but failure. Living on the outskirts of Los Angeles with his wife, an out of work actress, and daughter, they struggle to get by on low paid jobs, each day bringing a fresh round of disappointment. Then, after ten years of rejection, one of David’s scripts is bought for television and he suddenly finds that he’s the creator of a hit series. Blinded by success, it isn’t long before he starts an affair with a beautiful young producer, leaving his family behind for A list celebrity status. Rich and successful, David is living the kind of life he always dreamed of, but when a reclusive billionaire enters into his life proposing a collaboration, he finds that one decision can destroy everything you’ve ever worked for.

A Special Relationship

The riveting story of a woman who seemingly has it all, until the man she trusted the most threatens to take it all away.

State of the Union

Douglas Kennedy’s riveting new novel bears his trademark genius for writing serious popular fiction. Hannah Buchan leads an orderly life in a small town in Maine a schoolteacher, married to a doctor, with two grown up children. However, her past conceals a dark secret. Thirty years ago she had a brief, dangerous fling with Tobias Judson, a high profile student activist, which she had reconciled to that internal, off limits attic room marked Ancient History. But when Tobias suddenly pops up out of nowhere with a book about his radical years, her life goes into free fall. And before she knows it, Hannah discovers that a long ago transgression is never really forgotten. Set amid two wildly contrasting periods of recent American life the militant 60s and 70s, and the new found conservatism of today State of the Union is a remarkable portrait of one woman s attempts to find her own way in the shifting political currents of her time. But it is also an intriguing portrait of the complexities of a long marriage, the ongoing guilt of parenthood, the perpetual tension between familial responsibility and personal freedom, and the divisive debate between liberal and conservative values that so engulfs the United States today. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Woman in the Fifth

Douglas Kennedy’s new novel demonstrates once again his talent for writing serious popular fiction. The Pursuit of Happiness and A Special Relationship were both Sunday Times bestsellers in paperback. When Harry Ricks arrives in Paris on a bleak January morning he is a broken man. He is running away from a failed marriage and a dark scandal that ruined his career as a film lecturer in a small American university. With no money and nowhere to live, Harry swiftly falls in with the city s underclass, barely scraping a living while trying to finish the book he d always dreamed of writing. A chance meeting with a mysterious woman, Margit Kadar, with whom Harry falls in love, is his only hope of a brighter future. However, Margit isn t all she seems to be and Harry increasingly feels that a dark force is at work in his life as punishment begins to be meted out to anyone who has recently done him wrong. Before he knows it, he finds himself of increasing interest to the police, and waking up in a nightmare from which there is no easy escape.

Leaving the World

From the bestselling author of The Woman in the Fifth and The Pursuit of Happiness comes a devastating new novel. Years after vowing to herself and her parents to never marry, have children and lead the resentful life they chose, Jane, now a Harvard professor, falls unexpectedly pregnant. Resolved as she’s been to childlessness, she begins to warm to the idea of motherhood, even with a partner who is increasingly absent. But a devastating turn of events takes the decision out of her hands in a way she could never have predicted. Her familiar world torn apart, Jane feels forced to leave her old life behind. She resigns from her job, cuts all ties with friends and family and moves to a place where no one will find her. Isolated, she feels she has finally succeeded in leaving her world. Yet when a young girl disappears, prompting a high profile police investigation, Jane is drawn in. Convinced that the person at the heart of the case is much closer to her new community than anyone realises, she has to make a decision to either stay hidden or bring to light a shocking truth.

The Moment

From the New York Times bestselling author of Leaving the World comes a tragic love story set in Cold War Berlin. Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced writer in the midst of a rueful middle age. Living a very private life in Maine, in touch only with his daughter and still trying to recover from the end of a long marriage, his solitude is disrupted one wintry morning by the arrival of a box that is postmarked Berlin. The name on the box Dussmann unsettles him completely, for it belongs to the woman with whom he had an intense love affair twenty six years ago in Berlin at a time when the city was cleaved in two and personal and political allegiances were frequently haunted by the deep shadows of the Cold War. Refusing initially to confront what he might find in that box, Thomas nevertheless is forced to grapple with a past he has never discussed with any living person and in the process relive those months in Berlin when he discovered, for the first and only time in his life, the full, extraordinary force of true love. But Petra Dussmann, the woman to whom he lost his heart, was not just a refugee from a police state, but also someone who lived with an ongoing sorrow that gradually rewrote both their destinies. A love story of great epic sweep and immense emotional power, The Moment explores why and how we fall in love and the way we project on to others that which our hearts so desperately seek.

Beyond The Pyramids

This is a chronicle of travels through modern Egypt; a landscape strewn with incongruities and peopled by a vivid cast of characters. Their stories form part of Kennedy’s funny, yet ultimately serious portrait of Egypt today. Sidestepping the usual assortment of pyramids, Kennedy discovers an Egypt in which Bedouin watch American television, monks have word processors and everything is a world away from the common ‘archaelogical theme park’ image usually accorded this country.

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