From one of our most esteemed historical novelists comes a remarkable retelling of the Watergate scandal, as seen through a kaleidoscope of its colorful perpetrators and investigators.
For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated—uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs—it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal’s greatest mysteries—who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?—and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety.
In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now.
Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his “splendid evocation of Washington,” Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy which surpasses even that attained in his previous novels and turns a “third-rate burglary” into tumultuous, first-rate entertainment.
Thomas Mallon is the author of eleven novels and a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, "This moving book comes across like a concerto... with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration." Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children.