Our American Friend A Novel

A MYSTERIOUS FIRST LADY. THE INTREPID JOURNALIST WRITING HER BIOGRAPHY. AND THE SECRET THAT COULD DESTROY THEM BOTH. Tired of covering the grating dysfunction of Washington and the increasingly outrageous antics of President Henry Caine, White House correspondent Sofie Morse quits her job and plans to leave politics behind. But when she gets a call from the office of First Lady Lara Caine asking Sofie to come in for a private meeting, she’s intrigued. Sofie, like the rest of the world, knows little about Lara—only that Lara was born in Soviet Russia, raised in Paris, and worked as a model before moving to America and marrying the notoriously brash future president. When Lara asks Sofie to write her official biography, and to finally fill in the gaps of her history, Sofie’s curiosity gets the better of her. She begins to spend more and more time in the White House, slowly developing a bond with Lara, who, to Sofie’s surprise, is entirely candid about her mysterious past. The First Lady doesn’t hesitate to speak about her beloved father’s work as an undercover KGB officer in Paris—and how he wasn’t the only person in her family working undercover during the Cold War. As her story unfolds, Sofie can’t help but wonder why Lara Caine is rehashing such sensitive information. Why to her? And why now? Spanning from the 1970s to the present day, traveling from Moscow and Paris to DC and New York, Anna Pitoniak’s novel is a gripping page-turner about power and complicity and how, sometimes, the fate of the world is in the hands of the people you’d never expect.