Red star rising

With THE VIXEN (HarperCollins, $35), acclaimed writer Francine Prose explores a rich and tense period of American history in the early 1950s, when McCarthyism is waging a cultural cold war and communist sympathisers Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who are being sent to their deaths, are held up as all that is wrong with liberal thinking.

Young and impressionable Harvard graduate Simon Putnam, who is from a Coney Island family of Roosevelt Democrats, is starting his. The sexpot main character, Esther Rosenstein, is a caricature of Ethel Rosenberg and Simon is told the fate of the publishing house relies on the success of this potboiler. He does as he’s told, especially after he meets the beautiful but fragile young woman behind the book, Anya Partridge. As he begins to conduct an affair with her, he tries to persuade her to rewrite the book out of love for his mother, who knew Rosenberg.