Excerpt from Those Who Knew by Idra Novey, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But he'd been careful not to let the door shut with a woman this connected. He'd continued to call every few weeks and tell her he was just too overwhelmed to come by and see her-which had been true. He hadn't seen much of anyone. Except for the afternoons he took off to wait in his apartment for Maria to arrive with her latest scribbled calculations for eliminating tuition.

I hope it's obvious that I'm falling in love with you, he said to the woman as he watched her draw up her smooth, toned legs and smile. In fact, he continued, I'm wondering what you might say if I proposed right now.

On one condition, she replied, and Victor braced himself for an inquiry, a promise that he'd had no more than passing contact with that student who'd introduced him several times at the marches, the one killed last week above the Minnow.

But the woman's only condition was that he promise to always speak well of her father.

Victor propped his head on his hand to consider her more closely. Her robust chin was at odds with her thin face, and her augmented breasts, alluring as they were, looked out of sync with the otherwise blunt angles of her body. She'd made a far more striking impression coming toward him at the cocktail party where they'd first met than she did up this close in bed. The event had been for one of the most influential senators in the TJP. Victor had been standing alone by the windows, probing his teeth with the trio of toothpicks he'd accumulated from the lobster balls, when a trim woman in a strapless dress approached him, her smile as promising yet unquantifiable as the locked contents of a jewel box. She'd introduced herself as the senator's eldest daughter. Cristina, she'd added, as if it were an afterthought.

Under the sheets with him now, Cristina drew a little closer. In bed with me, she said, you can criticize my father all you want-just never in public.

Victor extended his hand and made much ado of tucking a lock of her lightened hair behind her ear. Together, he said, I think we could really wake up this sedated island.

Oh, I think we will. Cristina gave a playful bite to his shoulder, after which Victor mounted her more tenderly than he'd mounted any woman in years. For it was clear now she was going to marry him regardless. He didn't have to accept her one condition, and she wasn't going to inquire about Maria P.



In lieu of performing a Google search, Olga was rolling a robust joint for her friend. She hadn't gotten around to fixing her internet-or the plumbing for that matter. What for? She felt lighter inside when she deliberately streamlined her requirements of the world. The less she needed, the less guilty she felt about continuing to exist while the love of her life had not. When she needed to relieve herself, she forced her reluctant knees to deliver her out the back door of the bookstore and down the crumbling stairwell to her abode in the row of homes below.

If her neighbors living along the same staircase glimpsed her gray head bobbing slowly by and guessed she was headed home to relieve her bowels again, well, that was their problem. They already had some idea of what soldiers had done to her. Everyone in walking distance of the bookstore knew some rumored version of what she must have endured at the outset of the Terrible Years, when she'd been rounded up with hundreds of other student protesters. Although what had been done to the love of her life, right in front of her, was known to no one.

Her mythical status as one of the few exiles who'd returned to the island had even found its way into various travel guides, which caused a trickle of young backpackers from the northern country that had hosted her. The backpackers shuffled into the store greasy-haired and eager to convey what they'd learned in college about their government's insidious meddling in the rigged election that put Cato in power-as if any of it might be news to her. As if she might not be aware that their secret service had supplied the weapons and created the media panic about a Communist Threat that had barely existed.

Excerpted from Those Who Knew by Idra Novey. Copyright © 2018 by Idra Novey. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.