Fellow Travelers
A Novel
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2.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NOW A SHOWTIME LIMITED SERIES STARRING MATT BOMER, JONATHAN BAILEY, AND ALLISON WILLIAMS • A searing historical novel set in 1950s Washington, D.C.—a world of dominated by personalities like Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe McCarthy—and infused with political drama, unexpected humor, and heartbreak. • From the acclaimed author of Watergate and Up With the Sun
"Crisp, buoyant prose." —The New York Times Book Review
In a world of bare-knuckled ideology and secret dossiers, Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic, is eager to join the crusade against Communism. An encounter with a handsome State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim's first job and, after Fuller's advances, his first love affair. As McCarthy mounts a desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on “sexual subversives” in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives while moving between the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO's front line in Europe.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
This thoughtful and steamy historical novel was inspired by the incredible real-life LGBTQ+ culture that quietly arose in America alongside the 1950s Red Scare. After Ivy League college grad Timothy Laughlin lands a plum DC job, he embarks on a tempestuous love affair with a closeted State Department worker, accelerating his career while exacerbating his Catholic guilt. Against the backdrop of the Cold War and the anti-communist McCarthy hearings, author Thomas Mallon paints a nuanced portrait of Timothy’s idealistic but conflicted feelings—and the two men’s complicated romance. Mallon makes us feel the personal ebbs and flows that unfold alongside the dramatic realities of the time, making Fellow Travelers an enthralling read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McCarthy-era Washington, D.C., is as twisted and morally compromised as a noir Los Angeles in Mallon's latest, a wide-ranging examination of betrayal and clashing ideologies. The young ladies in the secretary pool are agog over dapper bureaucrat Hawkins Fuller, though his attentions covertly focus on newly minted Fordham graduate and good Catholic Tim Laughlin. Hawkins helps Tim land a job and, after feeling out the impressionable young man, makes a place in his bed for him. Mary Johnson, a friend to both closeted men, watches with rising alarm as Tim and Hawkins carry on their affair and Washington seethes in paranoia over Communists and "sexual deviation." Mary, meanwhile, succumbs to her own lustful yearnings and has an affair with a married businessman, leading to a predictable, though deftly played, quandary. The District's social milieu is solidly realized, with such period icons as Mary McGrory and Drew Pearson in evidence alongside political heavyweights McCarthy, Kennedy, Nixon and the like. Less convincing, however, is the on-again-off-again and largely one-sided relationship between Washington greenhorn Tim and cold, calculating careerist Hawkins. Mallon (Bandbox; Dewey Defeats Truman) offers an intricate, fluent and divergent perspective on a D.C. rife with backstabbing and power grabbing.
