Best Political Fiction Books

DeLillo's fictional account of Lee Harvey Oswald — the conspiracy theorists who recruited him, the forces that shaped him, and the day in Dallas — is the most formally rigorous of the many Kennedy assassination novels. DeLillo is not interested in whether Oswald did it but in what kind of person could be shaped into such an act: a man made entirely of images, ideologies, and other people's narratives.

Three friends from school — Sam, who has become a military dictator; Chris, his Information Commissioner; and Ikem, a poet and newspaper editor — find themselves on opposite sides of an impossible situation in the fictional West African state of Kangan. Achebe's final novel, written after twenty years of silence, is his most formally experimental and his most searching account of the failure of African independence.

Odili, an idealistic young teacher, becomes entangled with the corrupt but charismatic Chief Nanga — a 'man of the people' who embodies the endemic corruption of post-independence African politics. Published in the year of Nigeria's first military coup, which it seemed to predict, the novel is Achebe's darkest and most politically prescient.

In the fictional South American republic of Costaguana, revolution tears the country apart while the silver mine that funds both sides becomes the novel's true subject — the material interest that corrupts every idealism. Conrad's most ambitious novel is the first great political novel of the twentieth century.

A fictionalized account of Pakistani politics during the Zia ul-Haq era, told through the story of Omar Khayyam Shakil and two families — one a corrupt political dynasty, the other a military one — whose daughters embody the shame the novel's title names. Rushdie's satirical fable is more direct and controlled than either Midnight's Children or The Satanic Verses, and its portrait of how shame operates as political control is as precise as anything he has written.

Ludvik Jahn writes a postcard joking about the Party to impress a girl; the Party expels him, sends him to a labour battalion, and destroys his life — for a joke. Kundera's first novel is his most political: a study of totalitarianism's inability to tolerate irony, and of revenge as a futile response to power.

Mohsin Hamid's Booker-shortlisted novel. In a Lahore café, a bearded Pakistani man named Changez tells a nervous American stranger the story of his life — his Princeton education, his Wall Street success, and his disillusionment with America after 9/11 — in a tense, ambiguous monologue.

In the aftermath of the Red Wedding and the fall of King's Landing, power vacuums open across Westeros. Cersei Lannister consolidates control in the capital, Brienne of Tarth searches for the Stark girls, and Arya begins her training with the Faceless Men in Braavos — while the Iron Islands hold a kingsmoot that will reshape the shape of the war.

Will, a 'coloured' South African teenager, discovers his father Sonny—a political activist—is having an affair with a white woman who works for the anti-apartheid movement. The novel is narrated by Will and is about the cost of the political life on the family that sustains it. Gordimer's most personal meditation on the activist's divided loyalties.

A chemical company facing a massive jury verdict quietly funds the election of a handpicked judge to the Mississippi Supreme Court, ensuring a favourable ruling on appeal. Grisham's most overtly political novel strips legal fiction of its heroics to expose the machinery of judicial corruption.

Razumov, a Russian student in St Petersburg, witnesses a fellow student's assassination of a government minister — and is forced to choose between betraying his colleague to the police or destroying his own future. Conrad's most explicitly political novel is a study of betrayal, guilt, and the way political ideology consumes individual moral life.

James Bray, a British colonial official who was expelled from a newly independent African country for supporting the independence movement, is invited back ten years later to advise the government. He discovers the revolutionary leaders have become the new oppressors. Gordimer's most geopolitically ambitious novel.

In 1936, charismatic demagogue Buzz Windrip wins the US presidency on a platform of patriotism, nostalgia, and contempt for elites, then rapidly dismantles American democracy to establish a fascist state. Seen through the eyes of Vermont newspaper editor Doremus Jessup, Sinclair Lewis's 1935 satire is a manual for recognising authoritarianism written before the word was widely used.

A white senator who was raised as a Black child by a Black preacher in the American South is shot on the floor of the Senate and, as he lies dying, remembers his childhood with Reverend Hickman. Ellison's posthumously published second novel — assembled from forty years of manuscript — is flawed and incomplete but contains passages equal to anything in Invisible Man, and the central figure of the Black minister who raised a white child is among the most complex moral situations in American fiction.

A young woman from rural Iceland comes to Reykjavik to work as a maid and learn to play the harmonium. She discovers that Iceland is selling its sovereignty to NATO—her employer is among the politicians profiting from the deal. Laxness's most politically direct novel, written in 1948 as a protest against Iceland's military agreements.

Roy's second novel, twenty years after The God of Small Things, follows Anjum — a hijra who lives in a graveyard — and Tilo, an architect entangled in the Kashmir conflict, through a fragmented, polyphonic account of India's multiple political crises.

An Irish woman in Mexico encounters a political and religious movement attempting to revive the ancient Aztec religion and displace Christianity — Lawrence's most politically troubling and visually extraordinary novel.

A small Colombian town is disturbed by anonymous pamphlets—lampoons—that appear overnight on doors and walls, revealing private scandals. As the town's mayor tries to suppress them and violence escalates, García Márquez creates his most purely political early novel.