Forty-year-old Mary van der Linden is a British diplomat's wife living in Washington, D.C., entertaining at Embassy parties, happily absorbed with love for her husband Charlie and her two children. Charlie is bored and unhappy in his job and dangerously dependent on alcohol and pills. Their children are away at a boarding school in England. Into a cocktail party at their house one evening walks an American journalist, Frank Renzo—like Charliea veteran of World War II—who is covering the presidential race between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Soon Mary has fallen in love with Frank, and the two begin an affair that will change Mary's life forever.

In a new departure for Sebastian Faulks, whose previous novels have all been set in France, he draws the reader into a fateful love affair against the backdrop of an unforgettable moment in American history.