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Seventy-year-old Alec Malone, the protagonist in this novel, lives in Georgetown, at one remove, literally and figuratively, from the Washington political scene. His father, 95-year-old Erwin "Kim" Malone is a venerated national monument, a former nine-term U.S. Senator who has outlived all his critics. Though an only child, Alec has been careful to remain beyond the pull of strong Potomac currents. Instead of government, he chose photography as career. Maintaining his aesthetic purity, he even turned down a plum assignment to cover the Vietnam War. Now, abandoned by his wife, he contemplates the roads he has taken and rejected. Ward Just's Exiles in The Garden is not, however, a solitary meditation; Malone's musings are seasoned with his encounters with his Czech-American spouse and her émigré friends; his State Department official daughter; and his talented actress girlfriend. Former D.C. insider Ward Just has composed a Washington novel that escapes the confines of the genre.