Announcing ... Our American Friend!
She’s real! She exists!
Earlier this afternoon, my agent texted me with a picture of the galleys. My own box should be arriving any moment. (UPDATE: I got them!!! See above.) And so, now that this novel exists as a physical object in the world, an early version of her future hardcover self, it feels like just the right time to tell you a little more about my third child, who, after a bit of delay thanks to the pandemic, will be meeting the rest of the world in February 2022. Allow me to introduce my new book, Our American Friend, a political thriller starring two strong-willed women, spanning from present-day America to Cold War-era Moscow and Paris and beyond.
Each of my novels has given me the chance to bring to the surface certain preoccupying themes and ideas. This, I think, is the great gift of writing. It forces you to sit down and clarify your thinking. (Often I feel like I’m performing therapy on myself, which sometimes feels amazing, and sometimes feels like…a bad idea?) I’ve loved writing each of these novels. Even as these stories have nothing to do with my own life—financial conspiracies, villainous frenemies, mysterious First Ladies—they have a way of posing questions that feel relevant to my life, and maybe, hopefully, relevant to yours. This new novel, Our American Friend, is about a journalist, Sofie, who begins writing the biography of Lara Caine, a (fictional!) First Lady with a murky past. Their relationship begins with a degree of professional detachment, but over time, it changes, and grows into something deeper and also, inevitably, more complicated. In many ways, Sofie and Lara’s lives have nothing in common. In other ways, their lives bring them face-to-face with the very same questions. To whom do they owe their loyalties? Should they act, or should they stay on the sidelines? And how do they measure their own complicity?
I spent the latter half of the Trump presidency preoccupied with writing this novel. It was a useful source of escape. At times my immersion in this world—daydreaming about the Cold War, about dark Parisian streets, about dead drops and coded phone calls—caused me to feel a degree of guilt. Escape can be useful, but not if it blinds you to the surrounding world. This book is fiction (I repeat, fiction!) but I think, I think, it was also my way of beginning to process some of the feelings about what it was like to live through these past years. None of this was a conscious process, not exactly, but the real world has a way of forcing itself into your writing, even when you don’t intend for it to happen.
Well, anyway, whoops—I didn’t plan to take that digression right there. I meant to keep this short and simple, a lighthearted preview of the book-to-come. I’m still emerging from headspace of this novel, and it will be a while until I figure out how to speak about it in a cogent way! So I suppose this is my cue to step aside, and let the book speak for herself. I’ll be sharing more about Our American Friend in the months ahead—I had a blast researching this book, which involved a little bit of travel (remember travel??) and whole lot of geeked-out reading, and just take it from Andrew, I would be delighted to talk your ear off about this stuff—but, for now, I will leave you with Sofie Morse and Lara Caine, two women who I have spent a lot of time with over these past few years. Two women who are simultaneously brave and cowardly, who are simultaneously selfish and selfless; two women whom I love with all my heart, but who also drive me crazy. I wouldn’t have it any other way!
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A mysterious First Lady. The intrepid journalist writing her biography. And the secret that could destroy them both.
Tired of covering the grating dysfunction of Washington and the increasingly outrageous antics of President Henry Caine, White House correspondent Sofie Morse quits her job and plans to leave politics behind. But when she gets a call from the office of First Lady Lara Caine asking Sofie to come in for a private meeting, she’s intrigued. Sofie, like the rest of the world, knows little about Lara—only that Lara was born in Soviet Russia, raised in Paris, and worked as a model before moving to America and marrying the notoriously brash future president.
When Lara asks Sofie to write her official biography, and to finally fill in the gaps of her history, Sofie’s curiosity gets the better of her. She begins to spend more and more time in the White House, slowly developing a bond with Lara, who, to Sofie’s surprise, is entirely candid about her mysterious past. The First Lady doesn’t hesitate to speak about her beloved father’s work as an undercover KGB officer in Paris—and how he wasn’t the only person in her family working undercover during the Cold War.
As her story unfolds, Sofie can’t help but wonder why Lara Caine is rehashing such sensitive information. Why to her? And why now?
Spanning from the 1970s to the present day, traveling from Moscow and Paris to DC and New York, Our American Friend is a gripping page-turner about power and complicity and how, sometimes, the fate of the world is in the hands of the people you’d never expect.
“This should be catnip to political thriller fans—a smart, witty take on a fictional, foreign-born First Lady with a secret tied to Cold War espionage who tests the boundaries of friendship with her would-be biographer. This fast-paced novel about love, loyalty, and the secrets we should or should not keep will have you gobbling up each page.”
“Our American Friend is a smart political thriller, sharply observed and well written.”
“An irresistible political thriller with wit and heart, Our American Friend is a fascinating take on a mysterious fictional First Lady and a moving, rueful exploration of love, loyalty, and the presence of the past. ”