The bestselling author of Birdsong and Charlotte
Gray delivers an enthralling, vibrantly evocative novel set in America
in 1960, when the country stood poised between the paranoia of the Cold
War and the ebullience of the New Frontier.
Faulks' heroine is
Mary Van der Linden, a pretty, reserved Englishwoman whose husband,
Charlie, is posted to the British embassy in Washington. One night at a
cocktail party Mary meets Frank Renzo, a reporter who has covered
stories from the fall of Dienbienphu to the Emmett Till murder trial in
Mississippi. Slowly, reluctantly, they fall in love. Their ensuing
affair, in all its desperate elation, plays out against a backdrop that
ranges from the jazz clubs of Greenwich Village to the smoke-filled
rooms of the Kennedy campaign. A romance in the grand tradition that is
also a neon-lit portrait of America at its apogee, On Green Dolphin
Street is Sebastian Faulks at the peak of his powers.