ISBN The Last Thing He Wanted book English Paperback 240 pages

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Didion at her finest” —USA Today •An intricate, fast-paced novel about trying to create a context for democracy and getting hands a little dirty in the process, complete with conspiracies, arms dealing, and assassinations. From the author ofThe Year of Magical ThinkingandLet Me Tell You What I MeanThe narrator introduces Elena McMahon, estranged from a life of celebrity fundraisers and from her powerful West Coast husband, Wynn Janklow, whom she has left, taking Catherine, her daughter, to become a reporter forThe Washington Post. She finds herself boarding a plane for Florida to see her father. She becomes embroiled in her his business even though “she had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what he was doing.” It is from this moment that she is caught up in something much larger than she could have imagined.

Didion makes connections among Dallas, Iran-Contra, and Castro, and points out how “spectral companies with high-concept names tended to interlock.” As this book builds to its terrifying finish, we see the underpinnings of a dark historical underbelly.

JOAN DIDION was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion…