I can vividly recall reading this when it was first published, when Trump was still president, when we all thought Biden could never take the fight to him, when four more years seemed a probability, not just a possibility. And then what? What would he have done with four more years?
‘Love Letter’ gives one possible answer to that. A loving, beautiful letter from a grandfather to his grandson in a future America, where the Trump family has stolen the presidency, where letters are opened and read and keyboards are tracked. My new book, After London, describes a Britain under a surveillance government, and this does the same for America, but in only three pages, and with Saunders’s exquisite eye for human love and pain.
I’ve just reread it and it is still chilling. How close American came to disaster. And how close it may come again.
Published in The New Yorker, April 6 2020, and available to subscribers to read here
A Personal Anthology 