American Affairs — John Clark Pratt

""I wonder how long it will be before someone misses me, and I try to remember if I have any appointments this week. I don't think so. Then I wonder if Teresa or my landlady would sense something wrong if I didn't answer the telephone. I doubt that, too. Then I begin to hope that perhaps Quick has really "put someone on me," and I remember telling Casey that Quick saw all. But I know that no one really does, except perhaps God, so I pray a little. I imagine myself as the condemned man with his life flashing, but I do not know what I have been condemned for - or by whom.""

While scenes of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq dominate today's news, this elegant novel provides an insight into an earlier attempt by America to install a democracy in a formerly totalitarian state that is undergoing a revolution. Sectarian violence, language problems, CIA and State Department goofs all contribute to the occasionally lovely but ultimately sad experiences of a well-meaning American professor who becomes intimately and tragically involved with a lovely woman and the deteriorating political scene.

"John Clark Pratt wrote one of the truly great Vietnam War novels, The Laotian Fragments, and now he has written a comparably great novel that resonates strongly into our present unsettled times. American Affairs is worldly wise and richly moody and absolutely compelling reading. Pratt is a worthy descendant of Graham Greene." --ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, novelist and Pulitzer Prizewinner.

"American Affairs is superb. It is a timeless tale of love and upheaval with tragic results. Having been an American Foreign Service Officer in Portugal, I can attest that John Pratt's graceful novel of the last Cold War struggle captures a poignant vignette of this century." --CRESCENCIO ARCOS, former US Ambassador and Regional Vice-President of International Affairs to South America.