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Focusing on a richly significant time in our recent past, Sebastian Faulks, the bestselling author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, has written his first novel set in America. The year is 1960—a fascinating moment of transition in our country, when the comfortable Eisenhower years were drawing to a close and the ruthlessly competitive Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign signaled the beginning of a starkly different decade.

Mary van der Linden has recently moved from London to Washington, D.C., with her two children and her loving, admired husband, Charlie, who is posted to the British Embassy. Nearly forty, Mary has spent a lifetime as a loyal daughter, wife and mother. But in this year of so much change, she feels compelled to break away from her familiar world and is drawn to the freedom of New York City, which is effervescent with parties, jazz, three- martini lunches, girls in their summer dresses and men in their Sinatra hats and big ties. Greenwich Village is still charmingly bohemian, and Miles Davis’s hit tune “On Green Dolphin Street” is playing everywhere. Mary finds a hotel room in New York and then finds a lover, while back in Washington her husband drinks to forget the demands of his job, the absence of his wife and the Cold War paranoia that has overtaken the capital.

Faulks breaks new ground with this novel: It is a love story, not a war story, and it is set in America rather than France. Yet readers of his two previous bestselling novels will recognize the close focus of the historical setting, the unforgettable characters and the gathering emotional power of the narrative. On Green Dolphin Street is a dramatic, tremendously moving novel that is certain to extend the American audience for this prodigiously talented author’s work.

"Faulks, who is English, has taken considerable risks in setting the novel in a country he does not seem to know especially well and in a year that now seems surprisingly distant, and for the most part he has overcome them. Every once in a while Faulks insists on showing off his research..., but mostly he gets it right....He gets the country's mood right -- balanced uneasily between the fears of the Cold War and the optimism of Kennedy -- but without belaboring the point....There are times, to be sure, when he lays the emotions on a little heavily....Faulks is a romantic at heart, and romanticism often crosses the line between exquisite feeling and wretched excess. But he has given us three very real, immensely appealing people, and he has put them through an experience to which only the hardhearted can fail to respond with sympathy and empathy."

Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World, 01/13/2002

"The novel, which feels uninspired in its early and middle sections, gathers momentum and gravity as the question of honor and responsibility becomes more pressing....[Faulks's] account of the conflicting calls of duty and love makes the last pages of the novel race past as Mary, Frank and then fate finally make a choice."

Julie Gray, New York Times Book Review, 02/03/2002

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