“Ward Just is not merely America’s best political novelist. He is America’s greatest living novelist.”—Susan Zakin, Lithub  

Set in Indochina in 1965, A Dangerous Friend, tells a story of "the devolution of an innocent American crusading for democracy" (Vanity Fair), a man living the conflict of so many Americans caught in a political and spiritual crossfire. Sydney Parade, a political scientist, has left home and family in an effort to become part of something larger than himself, a foreign-aid operation in Saigon. Even before he arrives, he encounters people who reveal to him the unsettling depths of a conflict he thought he understood, and in Saigon the Vietnamese add yet another dimension. This "fabulous, tense and dramatic" (Los Angeles Times) narrative needs neither combat nor bloodshed to tell its tale.

A Dangerous Friend is the beautifully constructed story of civilians who want to reform Vietnam—but the Vietnam they see isn't the Vietnam that is.