Homeland

In April of 2008, Professor Paul Vines commits suicide in his apartment in Berlin. This moment is the culmination of the curiously interwoven stories of three characters: one a criminal psychologist working at Guantanamo Detention Camp Delta, one an FBI agent with a disturbingly familiar detainee locked in an isolation holding cell in JFK airport, and Vines himself, a Georgetown University literature professor working at the American Academy, Berlin. We watch Vines struggle to teach literature to a seminar of bemused German university students, as he is consumed by mistakes made in his past. life in Berlin and seeks comfort in an affair with an enchanting, though married, student. In Guantanamo, Cuba, Dr. Laura Ivans assists in the humiliating interrogation of a U.S. citizen (a Hispanic exfelon and erstwhile Muslim convert) who has been declared, on the slimmest evidence, an illegal enemy combatant. Her willingness to participate in this assignment sends her into a slow crisis of conscience that she is determined to stave off long enough to reap the fruits of collaboration, the true banality of evil. assigned to investigate a detained tourist - a 57-year-old former U.S. citizen turned Swedish national. Through a swift chain of errors-on-the-side-of-caution prompted by Patriot Act procedures, the detainee's questioning quickly snowballs into an incarceration where the man finds himself handcuffed and shackled in an isolation cell, and Michael James is his only link to sanity. often unforeseen changes that can completely alter lives and a chilling warning about the consequences of regulations imposed by the U.S. government in the name of security and patriotism. At once a political thriller, a literary novel, and an indictment of the current U.S. administration, Homeland is truly a book for our times.