The Sun King
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is one of the most highly regarded writers in the capital, an influential journalist and acclaimed novelist with a keen eye for the subtleties of power and politics. In The Sun King, Ignatius has written a love story for our time, a spellbinding portrait of the collision of ambition and sexual desire.
Sandy Galvin is a billionaire with a rare talent for taking risks and making people happy. Galvin arrives in a Washington suffering under a cloud of righteous misery and proceeds to turn the place upside down. He buys the city's most powerful newspaper, The Washington Sun and Tribune, and wields it like a sword, but in his path stands his old Harvard flame, Candace Ridgway, a beautiful and icy journalist known to her colleagues as the Mistress of Fact. Their fateful encounter, tangled in the mysteries of their past, is narrated by David Cantor, an acid-tongued reporter and Jerry Springer devotee who is drawn inexorably into the Sun King's orbit and is transformed by this unpredictable man.
In this wise and poignant novel, love is the final frontier for a generation of baby boomers at midlife—still young enough to reach for their dreams but old enough to glimpse the prospect of loss. The Sun King can light up a room, but can he melt the worldly bonds that constrain the Mistress of Fact? In The Sun King, David Ignatius proves with perceptive wit and haunting power that the phrase "Washington love story" isn't an oxymoron.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Washington Post columnist and accomplished spy novelist Ignatius (A Firing Offense) here largely abandons the mechanics of espionage and sets a character study of ambition and intrigue against the workings of a great Washington paper. The Washington Sun and Tribune, is, like the Post, a serious, family-owned business. David Cantor, the novel's cynical narrator, is the editor of Reveal, a debt-ridden society magazine at the other end of the spectrum. Providentially for Cantor, a feature he writes on mysterious new D.C. billionaire Sandy Galvin gives him a new lease on life. Galvin is intent on buying the Sun, and in exchange for some inside information, he promises to make Cantor his lifestyle editor. Cantor and Galvin are both Harvard men, though Galvin never graduated, and their business relationship becomes a friendship shot through with a shared sense of nostalgia and unrealized ambitions. All goes according to plan: Galvin panics the Sun's owners into selling to him, then shakes the place out of its stodgy slumbers with bingo contests and a cable-TV station hook-up. Cantor eventually realizes, however, that Galvin's real aim is to win back his one-time Harvard girlfriend, gorgeous Candace Ridgway, the paper's patrician foreign editor, a woman left with a "cold heart" after the Vietnam-era suicide of her father, then deputy secretary of defense. As Galvin's rise leads to his inevitable fall, Cantor watches from the sidelines, playing Nick Carraway to Galvin's Gatsby. A thoroughly involving narrative with a sharp, satiric edge, Ignatius's contemporary take on the tragic confluence of love, power and ambition is a sophisticated look at the media mystique and the movers and shakers in our nation's capitol. His stylish, fluent prose, anchored with fine atmospheric detail, gives the story texture and momentum.
