Deemed “one of the most interesting American novelists at work” by John Updike, Thomas Mallon has for many years fused history and fiction in entertaining and provocative ways. In Fellow Travelers, set in Washington, D.C., at the height of the McCarthy era, he unspools a yarn that intertwines the Red Menace and the Lavender Scare. The affair between a debonair, WASPy State Department officer and an earnest young Senate aide—both closeted gay men—plays out against the government’s dogged effort to purge homosexuals from its ranks. Mallon weaves McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade, the young protagonist’s struggle to reconcile his homosexuality with his Catholicism, and the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of the Cold War into a dense tapestry of events and ideas. Despite the darker overtones of the anti-gay and anti-Communist witch hunts, Fellow Travelers conveys a buoyant patriotic spirit—and the book provides an occasion for discussion about freedom, sexual identity, and the American Idea amidst the tensions of the Cold War.