I'm a big fan of Sebastian Faulks, particularly the French trilogy, and as I read this book, it was easy to remember why; his close attention to not only the complexity of human emotion and relationships is not only awe-inspiring but draws you in like few other authors do. However, towards the final, I could sense he was a little trapped and it got a little melancholic for me... and a little familiar too. And as I got closer to the end, this feeling grew stronger, like I'd "seen this film before" and I tried to pin it down. Originally I thought it would be "An Affair to Remember" (Cary Grant / Deborah Kerr) but it was closer to "Brief Encounter" (Trevor Howard) and a good book became a screenplay. Good films, good book, but the two art forms don't necessarily mix well and I was let down in the end. A tearjerker of a book.

heartbreaking!! not usually one to enjoy romance novels but every character is just so well-developed and there’s so much more going on in the background too, i had no choice but to really like it throughout tbh. unfortunately thanks to some fr*nch food, i was briefly dead and could not follow through with this as smoothly and quickly as i’d have liked. but still!!! made me feel and think things

I found the story long winded and needed to skip some pages/ paragraphs to keep going. I probably would not have finished it if I had had an alternative, but alas, on holidays with no choice.

I was beginning to despair slightly of Sebastian Faulks. After being bowled over by Charlotte Gray and Birdsong I was underwhelmed by Engleby and The Girl at the Lion d'Or. They had vivid scenery and beautiful language but I could never quite connect with the characters in a way that compelled me to keep picking up the book. On Green Dolphin Street was completely compelling. I got completely wrapped up in the tangled lives of Charlie and Mary van der Linden and Frank Renzo. I grabbed every opportunity to read ten or fifteen pages to see what new turn the lives would take. This is Faulks at his best; laying bare the lives of ordinary yet heroic people as they go about their lives making decisions that sometimes make them and sometimes break them. This was the first book for some time where I found myself looking for spare minutes just to be able to pick it back up and now that it's done I feel maybe I should have read it even slower.

VG. Story of diplomatic staff and press in UK and USA at around 1960 - an era I lived through with, by today's standards, a huge amount of smoking and drinking. At the beginning all seems reasonably well, but the author skilfully portrays a sense of disaster to come. The descriptions were long-winded in places, and I could not relate easily to the exhausting, stressful, politically-orientated, life of the main characters. But the good bits, and the continuing tension, made it all worthwhile.

My first novel by Faulks and it's a good one. Set in the 50s US, has a backdrop of great jazz. Well told story, actually it's a love story and I felt very sad at the end...

Really underwhelmed compared to the usual Sebastian Faulks books that I’ve loved. The wife of an alcoholic British consular advisor in Washington has an affair with a NY based journalist.

I really disliked this book and dragged myself through it. The characters are self absorbed and impossible to like or care about. Worse than that, I felt like I was drowning in the turgid details.

Early Sebastian Faulks novels convey a wonderful sense of time and place and ‘On Green Dolphin Street’ set in 1959, evokes perfectly the period of the later Cold War, the insidious investigations of the FBI, McCarthyism, U2 Spy Planes, the rise of JFK and his historic election victory of Nixon, Race Riots in Mississippi. This is a wonderful read - and for my money, this is easily Faulks' best novel – as, against this ground breaking backdrop he explores one of Life's most dangerous imponderables: should one stay true to one’s traditional upbringing and marital vows and live a restrained life not knowing what lies beyond the realms of respectability and convention, or surrender to one’s animal impulses and explore, dangerously, deviously and sensually an extra marital affair, and live life to the full no matter the consequences. But this is far more than a will she/ won’t she dilemma, as Faulks explores the essence of intimacy and attraction, need and dependency, and examines the explosive power of desire, and dangerous loss of self control. He captures vividly the emotional plight of two lost souls feverishly grasping opportunity and beginning an emotional journey that is life affirming but imbued with inevitable consequences that must be confronted.

His characterization is faultless as the central characters, all flawed in their different ways, confront their future lives with the very real possibility of letting their last chance of happiness slip through their fingers.
As Julie Myerson literature critic and author declared in The Observer, this book "is one of the most heart-shakingly accurate depictions of how it feels to be female and in love that I have ever read". Each character has their vulnerabilities, but their inner strengths are also well delineated.

For the timorous Mary,
'Everything had come at once, the tenderness, desire, the sublime simplicity of happiness that depended only on his presence and his face, the fierce knowledge that told her it was him or nothing but the void. And that it should have come at this time in her life, when she had thought that such things were past.'

Mary has been a 'good girl' and is now a dutiful diplomatic wife approaching middle age, when she experiences an unexpected sexual awakening that shocks her by its rapturous power and urgency.

'At this moment, for the first time in her life, she had experienced the transcendent combination of the fierce tenderness, such as she felt for Richard and Louisa (her young children) with the physical desire that had once before raged, many years ago, with David Oliver (her first lover) and which she had resigned herself never again to know. The simultaneous experience of the two feelings was not a simple addition of their respective effects; it felt to Mary as though the force was squared. She could not imagine how she was supposed to deal with it; but it felt like death - imperative, unavoidable, the only issue.'

" The practicalities of what she had fallen into and the vocabulary for them - 'affair' and 'infidelity' - had seemed to her banal and inadequate; she had always believed the adventure of marriage was incomparably more interesting than the petty indulgence of betrayal "

Frank Renzo reflects upon his time in New York,
' The city made him feel he could be many people, that in his middle thirties he was nowhere near the finished version of himself, and that even if he ever got there, that too might turn out to be provisional - not a stable compound of temperament and experience, but a bundle of momentary inclinations.'

For Frank, also, an all consuming passion comes with a compelling immediacy like first love,
‘ When he first saw Mary standing in front of the table in her sitting room…he had the sense of already knowing her profoundly well. The way he then behaved…. Was unprecedented but that was inevitable as she had opened up in hima depth of anxiety and desire that he had previously never known, and a new fever demanded a new remedy.’

Mary, too, finds their all consuming passion so intense that separation leaves her bereft as with a bereavement, and she reflects upon the morality of her life-shaping dilemma,
‘ To have him, be with him, see him, be part of him, is a natural imperative, because in some way he is me, my inner self.’

"He raked his fingers through her hair, down to the skull, as his body filled hers. All the way, he thought, I will go all the way, till I find her; and with her head between his hands he too let out a cry, because he felt pity for her soul."

‘ As her thought became less coherent, she closed her eyes…. The deeper into sensation she went…the more it was like going into a room of utter darkness, which she felt was familiar from a time before her birth; it was something other or beyond; it was like death or very near it.’

I read this in 2001

Set in 1959 USA during the Kennedy /Nixon campaign Mary is the wife of Charlie Van der Linden – an emissary in the British Embassy in Washington – whose life is one long round of parties and lunch meetings and general socialising. You’d think she’d have a great life but Charlie is slowly disappearing into the bottle (3 dry martinis before lunch?) and she has attracted the attentions of one of the many American journalists who attend the parties at the Van der lindens home. When Mary and Charlie ship their children off to boarding school in the UK Mary is somewhat at a loose end and that is when the trouble really starts.
Sebastian Faulks takes us on journey of discovery of self assessment of challenge to the established order of things in 1959. A slow and thorough exposition for 95% of the book written in the imaginative, elegant and appropriate prose that makes Faulkes stories such a joy to read. The introduction of Mary’s mothers terminal cancer and the pain and anguish of dealing with the death of her parent from the other side of the Atlantic (transatlantic flights in 1959 were very different from those in 2009) make Mary’s deliberations even more difficult. In the aftermath of the presidential elections that put Kennedy into office Charlie is sent back to Moscow which causes a cataclysmic crash of emotions and desires for Mary and the crisis that Charlie walks into there, threatens to pull Mary into complete chaos.
The last 5% of the book is written with an urgency and passion so different from the rest of the book. Faulks manages to pull the stress, strain and confusion within the characters into words that make you feel you are living every second of the last 24 hours with the people in the story. Or is it that you have to have been pushed and pulled from country to country yourself to appreciate the pain and torment Mary is put through.

For the first time in a long time, I had trouble formulating what kind of rating I would give this book. At times, it was skim-worthy (at least that’s how I felt about the Frank and Charlie’s backstories). At other times, I read slowly because the passages were so well-written that I wanted to be sure I absorbed every detail and emotion as much as I could. The background jives with what I’ve been digging lately - early 1960s…in this case, the shifting settings from Washington, D.C., New York, London, and even Moscow tie in with American politics, the Nixon-Kennedy debate, and the rise of Communism. I recently read Chris Wallace’s 1960 and loved A Complete Unknown, and the trifecta is this great novel.