Finale
  • Published: 18 August 2016
  • ISBN: 9781101872550
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 560
  • RRP: $36.00

Finale

A Novel of the Reagan Years

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Thomas Mallon, the author of the acclaimed novel Watergate, gives us a galvanizing new novel that brings to life the tumultuous administration of the most consequential and enigmatic president of modern times: Ronald Reagan.

A New York Times Notable Book
A Washington Post Notable Book
 
One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Beast, The Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Before there was Reagan the conservative icon, there was Reagan the president: genial, unknowable, faced with doubters, scandals, and the final throes of the Cold War. In this extraordinary novel, Thomas Mallon takes us to the tense, high-stakes months in 1986 when—with the Iran-Contra affair, the AIDS epidemic, and the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev—Reagan and those around him were shaping history. We see Nancy Reagan—brooding, protective, consulting her astrologist at every turn. We see the young Christopher Hitchens—his incisive, acerbic voice lending a powerful counterpoint to events as they unfold. And we see Reagan himself: apparently warm but in fact distant and mercurial, by turns seeming to know more than he lets on and let on more than he knows. Written with impeccable language and savage wit, Finale is historical fiction of the highest order, brilliantly rendering the human drama behind these famous—and familiar—faces.
  • Published: 18 August 2016
  • ISBN: 9781101872550
  • Imprint: Knopf US
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 560
  • RRP: $36.00
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About the author

Thomas Mallon

THOMAS MALLON is the author of eleven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, and Landfall. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Also by Thomas Mallon

Fellow Travelers
Up With the Sun
Dewey Defeats Truman
Henry and Clara
Two Moons
Yours Ever
Watergate
See all

Praise for Finale

Praise for Finale

  • "An intriguing, humorous, even catty backstage view of the Reagan presidency . . . [Mallon is] an artisan of the historical novel . . . Mallon's version of history is close enough to fact to revive faded memories, while his imagining of who thought and said what presents some of the coherence and delights of fiction."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
  • "Dramatize[s] the bizarre '80s intersection of Hollywood and Washington, D.C., as equal weight is given to Merv Griffin and Eva Gabor as to Pat Buchanan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, creating in the process a crazy, quilted depiction of a contradiction-filled presidential administration." --Publishers Weekly
  • "Mallon has crafted a scrupulously researched novel that gives readers a front-row seat on world-changing events--a combination that proves irresistible." --Booklist (starred review)