A wonderful read. Washington early 1960 with the forthcoming Kennedy-Nixon election in the background. Charlie van der Linden is a diplomat in the British embassy who lives happily with his wife, Mary and children. At a party in their home, Mary meets journalist Frank Renzo and so begins an affair which will upscuttle their lives. The writing is beautiful, the descriptions of the lovers' emotions are spot on. Although not as well known as Birdsong or Charlotte Gray, this is every bit their equal.

Give me a novel by Sebastian Faulks that does not include illicit love affairs in its narrative. Faulks is a superb writer with a gift of powerfully commanding words and turning them into an intricate and poignant tapestry of a person's emotions, conscience, morals while still adding beauty to the flawed and a deep understanding to the conflicted. However, I feel like the presence of affairs among characters have become a pattern of his stories which I have grown quite tired of and not that i'm being a prude because after all not all couples in marriages enjoy a love fueled by passion and sated by physical presence. 4 stars because no one writes about the inner goodness and pure intentions of humans as eloquently as Faulk's, which always saves his book from plunging into a boring love story.

Bowled over again by the maestro, man doesn’t miss

"Find out something new, or little-known and share it with your readers" was Faulks's response to a reader question about the underground war being fought in the trenches of the First World War in Birdsong.

Taking his own advice, he sees to it that I'm now quite clued-up on the 1960 Nixon/Kennedy battle for the White House, the layouts of Washington DC and New York, and the machinations of the UK Foreign Office, the FBI and Soviet close espionage as the Cold War approached its apex at the end of the 1950s.

As ever, this serves as background to Faulks's needle-sharp observation and articulation of personal joys, dilemmas and deeply-buried psychological issues, bound in a wrapper of a love affair played out as a mid-20th century Montague-Capulet tangle, and a conflict between passion and duty, with a bebop and hard bop soundtrack.