About the Book: When Valerie Lisowski, a veteran psychiatric nurse, returns home to Appleton during a turbulent political moment, she expects a quiet visit with her aging parents. Instead, an unexpected guest arrives with a revelation that shatters everything she thought she knew about her family—and her country. Decades earlier, her father Herb came of age in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, juggling his love of film, the burdens of service, and a fateful friendship with a displaced Soviet laborer. But it was his entanglement with powerful industrialists and an ambitious Wisconsin politician that set in motion a series of consequences reaching far beyond the Midwest. As Valerie listens to the story her parents never told, a hidden past emerges—one shaped by propaganda, political machinations, Cold War paranoia, and the dangerous ease with which ordinary people can become complicit in extraordinary wrongdoing. Moving between postwar Germany, mid-century Wisconsin, and the present-day labor protests unfolding at the Capitol, Rogues in a Nation intertwines personal memory with national history to explore how private choices echo across generations. Powerful, cinematic, and deeply human, this novel asks: What do we owe to the truth—and to each other—when the past refuses to stay buried?

About the Author: Andrew Lifson was born and raised in Queens, New York City. He holds degrees in English and Curriculum and Instruction from Queens College and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He spent an academic year studying at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, and has taught in the north of England. As a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1970s, he taught English as a Second Language in Kabul, Afghanistan. Settling in the Midwest, he went on to teach at the elementary level in Wisconsin public schools for more than thirty years.

Livestream: Andrew Lifson in Conversation with Doug Moe