Timely Topics - Political Fiction

Here is a small selection of books, each with a different take on what can play out during the course of a political campaign. Ranging from the classic to the irreverant, read one of these and then try to decide what's stranger, reality or fiction.

All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren - Set in the 1930s, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tracesthe rise and fall of demagogue Willie Stark, a fictional character who resembles the real-life Huey "Kingfish" Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his political career as an idealistic man of the people but soon becomes corrupted by success and caught between dreams of service and an insatiable lust for power. As relevant today as it was more than fifty years ago, All the King's Men is one of the classics of American literature.

Kissing Babies at the Piggly Wiggly by Rob Dalby - Newlyweds Laurie Lepanto and Powell Hampton organize the mayoral campaign of Hale Dunbar, in which they are assisted by the eccentric Nitwitt widows and hampered by Dunbar's long-lost girlfriend, Gaylie Girl.


Echo House by Ward Just - An epic chronicle of American political fortunes, Ward Just's twelfth novel is his masterpiece, realized through the minds and pulses of men and women who strive to save the nation--or themselves. "Echo House" takes readers through a maze of furtive power alliances and misalliances, involving two dozen characters from one Washington, D.C., family, over nine decades of history.

Election by Tom Perrotta - A comic story about a philandering high-school history teacher in the midst of a student-body election gone haywire.

Domestic Affairs by Bridget Siegel - Tapped to work for a Georgia governor's presidential campaign, fundraiser Olivia Greenley, believing she has landed her dream job beside a candidate of unimpeachable values, unexpectedly falls for the governor and is forced to keep their subsequent affair a secret at all costs.