Fiction

Andy Carver and Byron Walker are basically good guys. They just happen to have a highly questionable side-hustle.

Andy was a soldier. Now he's a tractor parts salesman with an adrenaline deficit. Walker is a middle school PE teacher who needs two part-time jobs just to make ends meet. Another thousand dollars a month would make a big difference for Walker. When an opportunity presents itself, Andy and Walker commit their first burglary, with more to follow.

Then they come across a weapon that has to have been stolen from the military. Andy feels obligated to report it to the Army, which means tiptoeing around what he and Walker were doing in a place they didn't belong. Soon, he's in an uneasy alliance with two military police investigators and an ATF agent.

All of this takes place in Raleigh, North Carolina during the early days of COVID-19 and the social and political upheaval of that time. Walker has a run-in with a group of anti-lockdown protestors who turn out to be connected to the stolen weapon. Later, he and Andy are caught up in a Black Lives Matter protest that turns into a riot.

Andy and Walker learn that right and wrong aren't always black and white.

Michael Dorris has crafted a fierce saga of three generations of Indian women, beset by hardships and torn by angry secrets, yet inextricably joined by the bonds of kinship. Starting in the present day and moving backward, the novel is told in the voices of the three women: fifteen-year-old part-black Rayona; her American Indian mother, Christine, consumed by tenderness and resentment toward those she loves; and the fierce and mysterious Ida, mother and grandmother whose haunting secrets, betrayals, and dreams echo through the years, braiding together the strands of the shared past.

Today, Mundy is a down-at-the-heels tour guide in southern Germany, dodging creditors, supporting a new family, and keeping an eye out for trouble while in spare moments vigorously questioning the actions of the country he once bravely served. And trouble finds him, as it has before, in the shape of an old German student friend, radical, and onetime fellow spy, the crippled Sasha, seeker after absolutes, dreamer, and chaos addict. After years of trawling the Middle East and Asia as an itinerant university lecturer, Sasha has yet again discovered the true, the only, answer to life -- this time in the form of a mysterious billionaire philanthropist named Dimitri. Thanks to Dimitri, both Mundy and Sasha will find a path out of poverty, and with it their chance to change a world that both believe is going to the devil. Or will they? Who is Dimitri? Why does Dimitri's gold pour in from mysterious Middle Eastern bank accounts? And why does his apparently noble venture reek less of starry idealism than of treachery and fear? Some gifts are too expensive to accept. Could this be one of them? With a cooler head than Sasha's, Mundy is inclined to think it could.

In Absolute Friends, John le Carre delivers the masterpiece he has been building to since the fall of communism: an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that spans the lives of two friends from the riot-torn West Berlin of the 1960s to the grimy looking-glass of Cold War Europe to the present day of terrorism and new alliances. This is the novel le Carre fans have been waiting for, a brilliant, ferocious, heartbreaking work for the ages.

"A searing, startling novel that sweeps through much of the twentieth century and up to the present conflict with Iraq." --Lev Grossman, Time