Product Description

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius is one of the most highly regarded writers in the capital, an influential journalist and acclaimed novelist with a keen eye for the subtleties of power and politics. In The Sun King, Ignatius has written a love story for our time, a spellbinding portrait of the collision of ambition and sexual desire.
        
Sandy Galvin is a billionaire with a rare talent for taking risks and making people happy. Galvin arrives in a Washington suffering under a cloud of righteous misery and   proceeds to turn the place upside down. He buys the city's most powerful newspaper, The Washington Sun and Tribune, and wields it like a sword, but in his path stands his old Harvard flame, Candace Ridgway, a beautiful and icy journalist known to her colleagues as the Mistress of Fact. Their fateful encounter, tangled in the mysteries of their past, is narrated by David Cantor, an acid-tongued reporter and Jerry Springer devotee who is drawn inexorably into the Sun King's orbit and is transformed by this unpredictable man.
          
In this wise and poignant novel, love is the final frontier for a generation of baby boomers at midlife--still young enough to reach for their dreams but old enough to glimpse the prospect of loss. The Sun King can light up a room, but can he melt the worldly bonds that constrain the Mistress of Fact? In The Sun King, David Ignatius proves with perceptive wit and haunting power that the phrase "Washington love story" isn't an oxymoron.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #682957 in Books
• Published on: 1999-08-24
• Released on: 1999-08-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Washington Post columnist and accomplished spy novelist Ignatius (A Firing Offense) here largely abandons the mechanics of espionage and sets a character study of ambition and intrigue against the workings of a great Washington paper. The Washington Sun and Tribune, is, like the Post, a serious, family-owned business. David Cantor, the novel's cynical narrator, is the editor of Reveal, a debt-ridden society magazine at the other end of the spectrum. Providentially for Cantor, a feature he writes on mysterious new D.C. billionaire Sandy Galvin gives him a new lease on life. Galvin is intent on buying the Sun, and in exchange for some inside information, he promises to make Cantor his lifestyle editor. Cantor and Galvin are both Harvard men, though Galvin never graduated, and their business relationship becomes a friendship shot through with a shared sense of nostalgia and unrealized ambitions. All goes according to plan: Galvin panics the Sun's owners into selling to him, then shakes the place out of its stodgy slumbers with bingo contests and a cable-TV station hook-up. Cantor eventually realizes, however, that Galvin's real aim is to win back his one-time Harvard girlfriend, gorgeous Candace Ridgway, the paper's patrician foreign editor, a woman left with a "cold heart" after the Vietnam-era suicide of her father, then deputy secretary of defense. As Galvin's rise leads to his inevitable fall, Cantor watches from the sidelines, playing Nick Carraway to Galvin's Gatsby. A thoroughly involving narrative with a sharp, satiric edge, Ignatius's contemporary take on the tragic confluence of love, power and ambition is a sophisticated look at the media mystique and the movers and shakers in our nation's capitol. His stylish, fluent prose, anchored with fine atmospheric detail, gives the story texture and momentum. Agent, Raphael Sagalyn. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Having thrilled readers with four action-packed novels (including A Firing Offense), Ignatius now does a neat backflip and thrills his readers with a love story. Publishing mogul Sandy Galvin, a.k.a. the Sun King, arrives in Washington, DC, one day with plans to revive a dying newspaper. He hires David Cantor, a cynical lifestyle writer with a profound appreciation for fluff journalism, and Candace Ridgway, a former flame and scrupulous foreign affairs writer also known as The Mistress of Fact. Shortly, both men are deeply involved with the Mistress, and the threesome spend the rest of the book sparring about love and journalistic ethics. The emotional integrity at the heart of this novel is searingly honest and makes for a wise and satisfying work. For all public libraries.
-ABarbara Conaty, Library of Congress
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A splendid, star-crossed Gatsby update that roasts on the same skewer Washington's power elite and the journalists they so easily seduce. Imagine Ted Turner buying the Washington Post just so he could woo Sally Quinn. Departing from his spy-thriller beat (A Firing Offense, 1997, etc.), Post columnist Ignatius offers a wickedly cynical insider account of irresistibly charming billionaire Carl Sandburg (``Sandy'') Galvin's purchase of the stodgy, respected Washington Sun and Tribune (a dead ringer for the Post, despite Ignatius's denial of this and many other factual congruencies), whose Pulitzer-winning foreign editor, Candace Ridgway, loved and left him back at Harvard. Now in her 40s, the blond and beautiful Ridgway, one of Georgetowns old money elite, maintains a platonic friendship with David Cantor, editor of the society magazine Reveal who developed an unrequited infatuation for her back when they were putting out the Crimson together. After flattering Galvin in Reveal, Cantor uses his friendship with Ridgway to help him pry the Sun away from its stuffy family owners. Galvin apparently sweeps Ridgway off her feet, naming her editor of the paper, and hires Cantor, the snide, sarcastic narrator of this cautionary tale, with instructions to make the newspaper more funwhich, for Galvin, means sweepstakes, warm-and-fuzzy animal features, and front-page crusades for unsung victims. The entrepreneur also establishes an anarchic cable news studio and, in the form of an inner-city youth scholarship fund, throws enough money around to get good press with the mayor and at the White House. When other papers and political agencies start poking into Galvin's shadowy past, Ridgway, by now passionately entangled with Galvin, secretly assigns Cantor and two Sun reporters to get the story first. The resulting truth says less about the promises of Gatsby-manqus than the twisted logic of aging Boomers, for whom success has come to mean never getting what they want. Fitzgerald's boozy gloom brightened with social satire, bittersweet romance, and a comic send-up of all that newspapers hold dear, from a man who's been there. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

a disturbing tale
A tale of a tycoon who comes to town to challenge the powers that be and ends up facing his own challenge with the woman he loves.

Sandy Galvin is the Sun King, a billionaire with a talent for taking risks. Galvin arrives in Washington and proceeds to turn the Capital up side down. He buys the city's most powerful newspaper and wields it like a knife. In his way stands his old Harvard flame, Candice Ridgeway a beautiful and icy journalist known around town as the Mistress of Fact. Their encounter is tangled in the mysteries of their past and narrated by David Cantor, who is an acid-tongued reporter, a big Jerry Springer fan, and is drawn into Galvin's life to be transformed by this unpredictable man. Love is the final frontier for a generation of baby boomers, still young enough to reach for their dreams, but old enough to see the prospect of loss. Galvin can light up a room but can he melt the heart or Candice Ridgeway.

This is a disturbing tale of ambition and sexual desire. I consider it of mature theme.

Gatsby, Schmatsby
This is a dorky book but fun. Ignatius is such a wimp, sniveling along, brown-nosing our intelligence with less than an elementary school belief system with his white knight profiling and self-feigned cluelessness. He comes up with some sweet words once in a while which chuckle up just fine. Ignatius is a zen storyteller, performing one of those acts of 'chop wood, become enlightened, chop wood. This book reads fun, yes I had to repeat myself. One has a good time enjoying the story and hoping to all ends of realty that Ignatius doesn't believe half the stuff he's writing.

5 Suns for Sun King
David Ignatius is a man of wit, sensitivity, and excellent fancy. He did a great job of creating an update of a Great-Gatsby like novel, with some well drawn wit and sarcasm to boot. But the book stands on it's own as a fantastic and sensitive tale of romance and power. What a tremendous love story!

And yes, I did have considerable sympathy for Carl Sandburg Galvin, his Gatsby character. Candace Ridgway is cold ambition in the flesh, a Randian heroine carried to her logical conclusion. A (more) pathetic Hedda Gabbler. Facts are her pistols, and her aim is deadly and true.

This is one to cry over, ladies (and gentlemen.)