Opera Book Club: Fellow Travelers

In Opera Book Club, use on-stage works as a jumping off point to read, discover, and gain added context to enhance your experience in the theater. Opera Book Club meetings take place at Union Public House. Appetizers will be provided, and additional food and drink will be available for purchase.

This meeting of Opera Book Club, we’ll be taking a look at Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon, the source material for this year's second opera of the season.

Opera Book Club events are free with registration. Due to limited capacity, please register for each individual meeting you wish to attend. You can register for this event by clicking the ticketing link below.

Synopsis – Fellow Travelers

It's 1950s Washington, D.C.: a world of bare-knuckled ideology and secret dossiers, dominated by personalities like Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe McCarthy. Enter Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism. An encounter with a handsome State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim's first job and, after Fuller's advances, his first love affair.

As McCarthy mounts a desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on “sexual subversives” in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. Moving between the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO's front line in Europe, Fellow Travelers is a searing historical novel infused with political drama, unexpected humor, and genuine heartbreak.