Purple Tower

The republic didn't fall in a night. It fell on a staircase — and every step was announced in advance.America, the near future. A generation of shuttered factories and evaporated pensions has curdled into the Contraction — a crash to rival 1929. Into the wound steps a construction-and-casino mogul with a purple-tinted face he insists is regal, a tower crowned in imperial violet glass, and a single sentence: only I can fix it.Sixty-one million people believe him. Not because they are fools — but because every institution that might have offered a rival sentence spent thirty years declining to.What follows is a war entered like a real-estate deal: a three-week "e;securing operation"e; that lasts thirty-one months, billion-dollar munitions raining on hundred-dollar decoys, victory declared nightly on the feeds while the price of eggs writes the truth on chalkboards. A man who has broken every deal he ever signed discovers, too late, that diplomacy has a memory — and that when the wolf finally needs a ceasefire, no one on earth will take his signature.And through it all, a nation stays silent, heads down, waiting for this madness to pass like every madness before it.This one does not pass.Told through the eyes of those who let it happen — the billionaire donor who wrote the checks and told himself we can control him; the welder's family in a dead town whose son ships out to a victory that was already declared; the woman in the pink Chanel coat who cheered alone in her kitchen and lived to trade couture for canned food — The Purple Tower interleaves its fiction with true historical echoes: Berlin 1923, Wall Street 1929, Munich 1938, Saigon 1967, Rome in the last winter of its Republic. The reader will recognise every chapter before the characters do.That is the point.A speculative political novel in the tradition of It Can't Happen Here, The Plot Against America, and The Handmaid's Tale — for readers asking the oldest question of all: can a republic survive its rescuer?