The bestselling author of and 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' ...The bestselling author of and 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.