From the highly acclaimed author of Bandbox and Dewey Defeats Trumanโa searing new historical novel about the competing claims of faith, love, and politics during the McCarthy era.
Washington, D.C., in the early 1950s: a world of bare-knuckled ideology, hard drinking, and secret dossiers, dominated by such outsized characters as Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta, and Joe McCarthy. Into this fevered city steps Timothy Laughlin, a recent Fordham graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism. A chance encounter with a handsome, profligate State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Timโs first job in D.C. andโafter Fullerโs advancesโhis first love affair. Now, as McCarthy mounts an increasingly desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on โsexual subversivesโ in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. Drawn into a maelstrom of deceit and intrigue, and clinging to the friendship of a beautiful young woman named Mary Johnson, Tim struggles to reconcile his political convictions, his love for God, and his love for Fullerโan entanglement that will end in a stunning act of betrayal.
Moving between the Senate Office Building and the Washington Evening Star, the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATOโs front line in Europe, Fellow Travelers is energized by high political drama, unexpected humor, and genuine heartbreak. It is Thomas Mallonโs most accomplished and daring novel to date.
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