Our American Friend

Journalist Sofie Morse is puzzled when U.S. First Lady Lara Caine, who at first appears to resemble Melania Trump—Eastern-European former model, cold demeanor, revolting husband—asks Sofie to write her biography. Sofie grows more bemused when interviews for the book reveal intimate details of Lara’s shocking history, a backstory that the president’s devotees won’t like at all. The tale woven by the First Lady is both a romance and a political drama that takes readers from Moscow to Paris and then New York, as Lara grows from dutiful Russian child to rebellious teenager, becoming forever changed by powerful love with a Soviet resistor while the regime he loathes crumbles. In the present day, Sofie and her husband are dragged into peril themselves as the interviews play out, with Lara’s family in the past and Sofie’s in the present embodying Churchill’s description of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” After Pitoniak’s (Necessary People, 2019) absorbing, immersive thriller, readers who enjoyed the romantic side of the work should try Paullina Simons’s The Girl in Times Square, while those who liked the dysfunctional Russian family aspect should be steered toward Zhanna Slor’s At the End of the World, Turn Left.