Books

Wright is the author of ten books, including The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, which spent eight weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Time Magazine pronounced it one of the 100 best nonfiction books ever written.

Mr. Texas

Hardcover: Knopf, September 19, 2023

A hilarious, sharply drawn send-up of Texas politics—from the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author. • A novel about a dark-horse candidate who risks his personal happiness for a career in the Texas House of Representatives Sonny Lamb is an affable, if floundering, rancher with the unfortunate habit of becoming a punchline in his Texas hometown. Most recently, to every…

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The Plague Year: America in the Time of COVID

Paperback: Vintage, January 31, 2023
Hardcover: Knopf, June 8, 2021

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it. From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story…

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The End of October

Paperback: Hardcover: Knopf, MAY 12, 2020

In this riveting medical thriller–from the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author–Dr. Henry Parsons, an unlikely but appealing hero, races to find the origins and cure of a mysterious new killer virus as it brings the world to its knees. At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When Henry…

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God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State

Paperback: Vintage, March 15, 2019
Hardcover: Knopf, April 17, 2018

With humor and the biting insight of a native, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower explores the history, culture, and politics of Texas, while holding the stereotypes up for rigorous scrutiny. God Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America. It is a red state in the heart of Trumpland that hasn’t elected a Democrat to a statewide office in…

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With the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright became generally acknowledged as one of our major journalists writing on terrorism in the Middle East. Here, in ten powerful pieces first published in The New Yorker, he recalls the path that terror in the Middle East has taken, from the rise of al-Qaeda in the 1990s to the recent beheadings of reporters and aid workers…

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Thirteen Days in September: The Dramatic Story of the Struggle for Peace

Paperback: Vintage Books, April 28, 2015 Hardback: Knopf, September 16, 2014

In September 1978, three world leaders—Menachem Begin of Israel, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and U.S. president Jimmy Carter—met at Camp David to broker a peace agreement between the two Middle East nations. During the thirteen-day conference, Begin and Sadat got into screaming matches and had to be physically separated; both attempted to walk away multiple times. Yet, by the end, a…

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Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief

Paperback: VINTAGE BOOKS, NOVEMBER 5, 2013 Hardback: Random House, January 17, 2013

“Powerful... essential reading.” —The New York Times Book Review A clear-sighted revelation, a deep penetration into the world of Scientology by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, the now-classic study of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack. Based on more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists — both famous and less…

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The Looming Tower : Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Knopf (Release date: August 8, 2006) Penguin, UK (Release date: August 31, 2006)

From the cover of the New York Times Book Review (August 6, 2006) “This is the story of how a small group of men, with a frightening mix of delusion and calculation, rose from a tormented civilization to mount a catastrophic assault on the world’s mightiest power, and how another group of men and women, convinced that such an attack was on the way, tried desperately to stop it.…

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Noriega: God’s Favorite [Novel]

Simon & Schuster (Release date: March 9, 2000)

In this fascinating work of historical fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Lawrence Wright captures all the gripping drama and black humor of Panama during the final, nerve-racking days of its legendary dictator, Manuel Antonio Noriega. It is Christmas 1989, and Tony Noriega's demons are finally beginning to catch up with him. A former friend of President Bush, Fidel Castro, and Oliver…

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Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are

John Wiley & Sons (Release date: February 10, 1999)

Expanded from an article for The New Yorker magazine, Twins is both a scientific and philosophical exploration of a little-understood and yet fascinating human phenomenon.

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Remembering Satan

Knopf (Release date: March 29, 1994) Vintage Paperback (Release date: April 25, 1995)

“The most powerful and disturbing true-crime narrative to appear since Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.” —Time A horrific but true account of an alleged case of “recovered memories,” which destroy a family and a man’s life. In 1988 Ericka and Julie Ingram began making a series of accusations of sexual abuse against their father, Paul Ingram, who was a…

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Saints & Sinners

Knopf (Release date: March 1993) Vintage Paperback (Release date: May 28, 1995)

In this fascinating book about religion in America, one of this country's most probing yet sympathetic journalists puts forth stories not only of real grace but of despair, sexual scandal, and attempted murder. Lawrence Wright's Saints and Sinners are Jimmy Swaggart, who preached a hellfire gospel with rock 'n' roll abandon before he was caught with a, prostitute in a seedy…

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In the New World: Growing Up in America, 1964-1984

Knopf (Release date: December 1987) Vintage Paperback (Release date: February 12, 2013)

We first meet Larry Wright in 1960. He is thirteen and moving with his family to Dallas, the essential city of the New World just beginning to rise across the southern rim of the United States. As we follow him through the next two decades — the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the devastating assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the…

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A first-hand of the account of the Fresh Air Fund — kids from New York City's ghettos and projects spend a summer in an Amish farm community in Pennsylvania.

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