10 Great Books About Washington, D.C.

This book helps you teach your little one the alphabet with beautiful illustrations of images and concepts that bring D.C. to mind: U is for the U.S. Constitution, V for Vintage Campaign Buttons. Alphabet books are not just educational, they are also soothing for bedtime, as the pattern of A is for…, B is for… repeats itself.

This middle grade novel about a change of President focusses on two sets of First Children and the prank war that ensues when two girls must hand over their home — the White House — to its new inhabitants.

This 2007 novel about immigration, race, and gentrification won countless prizes and was named a New York Times Notable Book. It explores the life of a young Ethiopian immigrant finding his way in Washington, D.C.

“It was a textured story about the immigrants’ struggle in America, rendered in beautiful prose and from the perspective of an African shop-owner in Washington, D.C.,” says The Economist.

Sometimes, the most unlikely people can be thrust together into something like friendship — or, at least, each other’s company. Aimee Agresti’s novel about four women whose spouses are away on various political campaigns explores that kind of relationship.

Booklist gave it a starred review, saying: “Agresti’s first novel for adults hits the right balance of Washington insiderness and women’s fiction,” adding that it combines “domestic and romantic foibles with an enticing cast.”

“This is what people talk about at an Obama campaign reunion,” begins this book, and you know straight away that you’re in the hands of someone who can make the political world of D.C. come alive, complete with its ambitious and sometimes insufferable campaign staffers.

This novel may have been set in 2013 — what now seems like an endearingly simple time — but it’s a lot of fun, and will give you all the Veep vibes. Karin Tanabe was heavily inspired by her time at Politico when she wrote this story about a young journalist who crouches in bushes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and discovers a scandal she has to decide whether to break.

Set in the summer of 1959, amid Cold War–era tensions between neighbors just outside the city, this short novel is a delightful coming-of-age story about a group of kids thrilled by the arrival of enormous spiders and determined to throw a party and get everybody they know to like each other. A passage towards the end of the books shows how little about the character of the city has changed in sixty years: “I can see that much of the drama was just Washington, where things can change fast, weirdness and treachery can prevail, people and things are neither what they seem nor what they are said to be […] and everybody is forever moving on.”

If you want a thorough, extensive history of D.C. not just recently but in the past four centuries, this is a great place to start. At over 600 pages, it chronicles the District’s many transformations from a plantation society to the first Black majority city, from a center of the slave trade to a place ringing with protests for justice.

While D.C. feels like a very different place from how it did in 2013, when this book was published, it’s an important book for understanding how people think and behave in “this town” — an almost anthropological study of the political side of D.C., with all its sometimes laughable excesses.

This collection of essays gives a great flavour of the smart, ambitious staffers who worked in the Obama Administration — stories, in the words of the subtitle, from dream chasers, change makers, and hope creators.