Red, White, Blue

Praise

“Finally, the perfect spy novel for the post–9/11 era. Carpenter’s Red, White, Blue brilliantly evokes the world of American espionage in a time of crisis, as the struggle to fight terrorism conflicts with longer-term views of American interests and agents find themselves trapped within conflicting loyalties to friends, to assets, to family, and to country. Thrilling, provocative, and powerfully moving.”
—Philip Klay, author of Redeployment

“Red, White, Blue is a beautifully written, utterly gripping, and haunting story of espionage. Both timely and relevant and, in the tradition of the best spy novels, it is about secrets, deception, betrayal, and lies, the cruelest dilemmas of human nature.”   
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs and The Moscow Trilogy

“Carpenter… brilliantly uses the conventions of spy fiction to expose the duplicity and betrayals in people’s lives. In her chilly, unsparing dissection of the trickle-down effect the muddied morality of bureaucracies has on private lives, Carpenter reveals the influence of Joan Didion.  Carpenter’s mesmerizing follow-up to her acclaimed war novel, Eleven Days, is as deeply affecting as it is razor sharp.”
—Kirkus Review (Starred) 

“Lea Carpenter has written the perfect post-modern spy novel, a story of espionage but also of love and secrets. A stunning mix of prose and suspense: Imagine Joan Didion meets Alan Furst.”
—Janine di Giovanni, author of The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Iraq

“Why does the stuff of espionage lie so close to essential matters of the human heart?  Love, loyalty, lies, betrayal—Lea Carpenter plumbs the depths of all these in this brilliant, very possibly flawless book. I can think of no novel in recent memory that blends the personal and intimate so truly with power and conflict on the grand geopolitical scale. Red, White, Blue is a marvel and a masterpiece.”
—Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
 
“Red, White, Blue is that rarest of rare literary jewels: a genre-bending masterpiece of brilliant story-telling that combines breathtaking skill with exquisite artistry.” 
 —Amanda Foreman, author of A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War

“With the elegant restraint of an intelligence operative herself, Lea Carpenter unwinds the complex relationship between a daughter and her secretive father.  Her book delves into the obscure culture of the CIA, but even deeper into the way that a man’s necessarily hidden life impinges on his child’s sense of coherence.  This is a riveting and disturbing account of attachments that can never be fully resolved, a book about dignity and discretion and their oblique relationship to intimacy.”  
 —Andrew Solomon, PhD, author of Far From the Tree