Faulks on Fiction

On Green Dolphin Street is a new departure for Faulks, yet readers will recognize the intensely close focus of the characterization, the wide historical perspective, and the gathering emotional power of the narrative.

The United States of America, 1959. With two young children she adores, loving parents back in London, and an admired husband, Charlie, working at the British Embassy in Washington, the world seems an effervescent place of parties, jazz and family happiness to Mary van der Linden.

But the Eisenhower years are ending, and 1960 brings the presidential battle between two ambitious senators: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. An American newspaper reporter, Frank Renzo, enters the van der Lindens' lives, and through him Mary is forced to confront the terror of the Cold War that is the dark background of their carefree existence.

In New York, Mary finds a transfiguring personal happiness, yet ghosts of America's recent past - of McCarthy, the war in the Pacific, the struggle in Indochina - exert a subtle, disorienting pressure on the lives of all the characters.

This is partly a love story, partly a novel about America; more particularly, it tells of a solitary woman and her exhilarating attempt to face down death.