Shakes here...
Via Political Wire, I see that the Wall Street Journal has chosen as the five best political novels Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister, Charles McCarry’s Shelley's Heart, Qiu Xiaolong’s Death of a Red Heroine, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King's Men.
Unsurprisingly, my choices would be different from theirs. In fact, how I define a “political novel” probably differs from theirs. Is To Kill a Mockingbird a political novel in the same sense as All the King's Men? No, but I would certainly classify it as a political novel nonetheless.
