Exiles in the Garden: A Novel [Paperback]

"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." (Los Angeles Times )

"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 émigré 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 VietnamWar—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.

Ward Just is the author of fifteen previous novels, including the National book Award finalist Echo House and An Unfinished Season, winner of the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Award and a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. In a career that began as a war correspondent for Newsweek and the Washington Post, Just has lived and written in half a dozen countries, including Britain, France, and Vietnam. His characters often lead public lives as politicians, civil servants, soldiers, artists, and writers. It is the tension between public duty and private conscience that animates much of his fiction. Just and his wife, Sarah Catchpole, divide their time between Martha's Vineyard and Paris.