The Devil's Presence: A Novel

Can fiction save us? Is there hope for America in the time of Trump, pandemics, QAnon, and the end of genuine political discourse? What better than this perfectly told novel to tell the story of so many of us to ourselves, as we seek hope and solace in terrible times.

Andy McKnight had never seen anything like it; nobody had. The election of this man was breaking up families across the nation – wives and husbands, children and parents, lifelong friends, the fabric of American social life torn apart as it hadn’t been since the Civil War. The venom even seeped into his own happy home. Then came the pandemic, two plagues at once – even in the Bible they were one at a time. He tried escaping into the past, back to better times, but Max and Elly, an old man and a young girl he met on the streets of Santa Monica, jolted him back to reality. With others like them – mad as hell and not going to take it anymore – maybe it wasn’t too late after all.

James O. Goldsborough, raised in Los Angeles, is an award-winning writer with a 40-year career in journalism. Goldsborough spent 15 years in Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, International Herald Tribune, Newsweek Magazine and the Toronto Star. He has written numerous articles for the New York Times Magazine, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy. His first book, “Rebel Europe,” published by Macmillan, was hailed by the Los Angeles Times reviewer, “the most important book I have read in years.” He next published The Misfortunes of Wealth a family memoir dealing with the disadvantages of inherited money. His earlier well-received historical novels are The Paris Herald (2014) and Waiting for Uncle John (2018), both published by Prospecta Press and Blood and Oranges (2021) published by City Point Press.