In this passionate and revealing tale of Washington politics, Ward Just tells the story of a young pollster who becomes a savvy political insider and eventually a U.S. senator - but not without paying the usual dues. And the payment turns out to be a dirty, or at least a cloudy, business. Jack Gance tells how the dues are paid and how one political devotee spends his life in politics, wastes his love on married women, and finally learns who his true mistress is.

This masterly volume comprises the best of the shorter fiction written by Just over the past 25 years--"masterpieces of balance, focus, and hidden order" ("Chicago Tribune").

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.

Sydney Van Damm loves living among foreigners: having escaped Germany and his boyhood memories of World War II, he makes a life as a translator in Paris. There he meets Angela, an American expatriate who becomes his wife. Their marriage is brushed by tragedy, and in the turbulent seventies and eighties, as the new Europe is born, Sydney gets involved in an East German scam that comes crashing down around him.

A major novel by the author of "Echo House", set in Indochina in 1965. Sydney Parade, a trained political scientist, runs away to Saigon in an effort to become something larger than himself--and begins--but only begins--to understand something of the complexities of Western survival in the Third World.

The American Ambassador is at once a riveting tale of suspense and a thoughtful meditation on the fragility of Western values in an age of terrorism. William North is a Foreign Service officer who fiercely loves his family and his country. His son, brilliant and thoroughly disaffected, sees his father as the embodiment of all that is corrupt in Western democracies. When the younger North aligns himself with a German terrorist organization, the conflict between father and son escalates to a matter of national security. In this breathtaking novel, Ward Just takes us inside the mind of a...

In this astute novel of Americans abroad, Ward Just turns his keen eye toward the dark underpinnings of nationalism, fame, and artistic integrity. When a famous Hollywood director travels to post-Wall Germany to rekindle his genius, he is unexpectedly reunited with an actress who mysteriously disappeared from the set of his movie thirty years before. Masterly and atmospheric, The Weather in Berlin explores the subtleties of artistic inspiration, the nature of memory, and the pull of the past.

Jonathan Yardley called A Family Trust "his longest, his most ambitious and his best... a book with serious purposes that manages to entertain at the same time...rich in carefully observed details, in quick, sharp perceptions that reveal more than one at first understands...a fine, satisfying, rewarding book, the work of a mature and accomplished novelist," upon the book's initial publication in 1978. The passing of Amos Rising, town elder and editor of The Dement Intelligencer, leaves the Rising family without a patriarch and the town with a hole in its center. The ambitions...

Now available again after twenty years: Ward Just's acclaimed first novel about an American drawn into the complexities of South American politics

"As a young man, Ward Just spent eighteen months in Vietnam as a correspondent for the Washington Post. The experience would earn him both a citation from the Overseas Press Club and a Combat Infantrym"