This book is definitely worth the read. It traces the lives of 3 individuals. All live life to the full, with passion and ambition. What they have in common is not only their passion and ambition in life but that they all die young. It is an inspiring read to see what they overcame and accomplished in their quest for happiness and perfection in their life space. Read it.

I have just recovered from reading this novel of Sebastian Faulks. The tension that is created with the love affair in this book holds true right to the very last.

Set in America against the backgroud of the Cold war and the election of President Kennedy this story unfolds in a way that encompasses the mood of the era while allowing the characters room to breath.
The main character Mary begins the novel woth the "perfect" life. She has a loving husband with a top job in the embassy and two adoring children. As the pages fly by we learn that not all is well in Mary's life, her husband Charlie starts to lose his grip in a battle with the bottle. Her children are sent off to boarding school in England.

Mary becomes involved with a journalist called Frank and thus ensues a series of adulterous visits to New York where instead of "writing a book", Mary becomes smitten by her new lover.

The reader is left breathless as the plot comes to an end.. will Mary go for the greener grass or will she face up to her duties to her poor husband and her ever changing children ?

This is genuinely a story of love and war - and the extremes about what humanity is and means. This is not a romance, nor is it exclusively a WWI novel. It is a true literary work that engages the spirit. I am hard pressed to recall a book that gave me such a sense of sound and sensation. Many of the tactile and visual descriptions were so fresh and new, yet true, that I found myself re-reading the passage for the sheer beauty of the language.

It is heavy reading from an emotional standpoint but the narrative itself straightforward, pretty much linear and easy to follow. Unlike other reviewers, I did not find that the multigenerational passages disturbed the flow of the novel. Nor did I feel that the "parts" created an incongruous whole. Nevertheless, it is not a quick read - it is to be savored for all of the emotional impact and sensation it evokes.

Birdsong is not just about the degradation of humanity under the grotesque conditions of trench warfare, it is also about the elation of human beings, and their real-life struggles, as well as the restoration and continuity of humanness across generations. Rarely have I encountered such masterful characterization - the people and their stories and beings pull you in and grip you to the very end.

Normally I wouldn't add my own comments to a book which has been reviewed so fully and received so much praise. In this case, having just finished the book I have to say that every word of praise is fully justified for this magnificent, disturbing and enriching novel. I found I really cared about all the characters, found myself caught up in the emotional traumas just as much as in the harrowing trench warfare (and underground warfare) scenes. All the more terrifying for being true, it is simply astonishing to think what ordinary people went through. I shall never ride the London Undergound again without thinking of the men who dug those tunnels. The descriptions of the night before the big Somme offensive, and the dreadful, pointless slow advance through a sky full of screaming metal, are some of the finest war literature I've ever read. Don't be put off by half-hearted reviews of other books by this author..Birdsong is a wonderful novel. If you read it, you'll never forget.

Listen closely. I read a lot of books, especially war-related fiction and literature. I only write reviews of books which I strongly feel satnd out from the rest. "Birdsong" is an incredible novel. The writing style, dialogue, and plot construction are all top-notch. This is a classic love and war novel. The description of WWI trench warfare is striking; and Faulk's observations on the reality and futility of war will get you thinking long and hard. The sex scenes are beautifully described and Faulks manages to evoke an equal balance of wild lust and passionate love. Also, Faulk's moving back and forth between WWI and 1970's is masterfully done, showing the differences between generations. Not a boring chapter in this book.

The people who criticized this book simply do not know what good writing and literature is. They were probably looking for something more shallow and simplistic. This book will go down as one of the best novels of the later 20 centruy and they will all feel like the simpletons they are. Take the time to lose yourself in this story and you won't regret it.

I loved Sebastian Faulks' trilogy of novels set in Vichy France: "Girl at the Lion d'Or," "Birdsong," and "Charlotte Gray," so I thought I would love "On Green Dolphin Street" as well, however something is definitely missing that was present in abundance in the earlier books.

While I know France well, I don't know New York at all. I have to assume that Faulks, a wonderful writer and a wonderful chronicler of detail, portrayed New York accurately, for even though I am not at all familiar with the locations detailed, they did come alive for me; I felt as though I were really there as well, right alongside Mary and Frank.

"On Green Dolphin Street" is the story of a troubled marriage and a troubled couple, the very, very correct Charlie and Mary van der Linden. Charlie, a Washington-based diplomat, is the first character in the book to display signs of discontent. On the surface, his life is serene and any outsider would think he had every reason to be deliriously happy. He's witty, he's charming and he's smart, but he's also frequently drunk, at loose ends, and feeling the beginnings of depression.

Enter Chicago journalist, Frank Renzo, a longtime friend of Charlie's, one he met in Vietnam. Frank is everything that Charlie is not (or not longer is) and, he just happens to adore Mary. Frank and Mary are good, honorable people and both of them care deeply for Charlie, but, Charlie's duties keep him away more and more and Mary finds that filling the empty hours is easier in New York...with Frank as her guide. Frank shows Mary the real New York and, as he does, Mary inevitably falls in love with him, a love that is most decidedly returned.

Love triangles are nothing new in the novelistic world and, unfortunately, Faulks brings nothing new to the cliche. "On Green Dolphin Street" is as wonderfully written as Faulks' previous novels, but even his superb writing skills can't make up for the lack of a fresh and convincing story. Mary and Frank's discussions often seem stilted and artificial. As much as this pair swear they love each other, they lack passion and tension. No, they aren't cardboard cutouts, Faulks is far too good a writer for that, but something is definitely missing.

This is not to say that the book doesn't have its moments. It most definitely does and the best ones occur in flashback, during moments of high tension. This is, of course, Faulks' forte, pitting characters in flux against tumultuous times. Part of the reason for the relative tepidness of this book may be due to the relatively tepid times in which it is set.

It is not giving anything away by saying that Mary's life eventually begins to unravel and she is forced to make some very difficult choices. While the first two-thirds of this book may be lukewarm, the last third is quite moving. The final chapters even border on heartbreaking.

The 60s era is not an era I find intriguing. Those who do will no doubt like this book more than I did. And those who like their novels firmly rooted in the affairs of the heart will find more than enough to enjoy here. "On Green Dolphin Street" is a good book and one that is well-written. I just didn't find it up to the very high standard Faulks, himself, set with his previous work.

This is the first book by Sebastian Faulks I've read but from what I'm told his others are better. I am relieved to hear that because I wasn't enchanted by this uneven tale. The story is moving but the style occasionally limps along.

In summary, Charlie is a British diplomat living in the USA with his wife Mary and their two children. They enjoy a rather high life in Washington characterized by parties and an envious lifestyle. Charlie is an alcoholic plagued by internal demons. It seems we are meant to believe that Charlie's drinking is justified because of his intelligent perceptions but most readers will see that he suffers from "terminal uniqueness" and uses his intelligence as a means of talking himself out of staying sober. Mary meets Frank, a bohemian reporter, and engages in a love affair. The affair runs its course. Mary's family needs her and so it ends.

One of the biggest obstacles to finding this an original reading experience is the exploitation of common 60s, Eisenhower and Kennedy mythology. Both amusingly and dully, these characters do little else but drink and smoke. I doubt there is one exchange between the principal characters which isn't fueled by alcohol, or during the aftermath of a rampant drunken spree. Between the lines, it's the story of how alcohol can affect the life of anyone within the radius of an alcoholic.

Nevertheless, certain passages and descriptions are deeply moving and original. Mary's emotional dilemma is tangible and upsetting and the final separation between the two lovers is excruciating. The family ties between Mary and her parents and children are beautifully drawn. It's certainly worth reading if you're trapped inside with nothing to do on a rainy Sunday evening.

Looking at a highly significant part of American history, Sebastian Faulks, the best-selling author of Charlotte Grey and Birdsong, chose to set his new novel in America. Unlike his previous novels, which focus on British history, On Green Dolphin Street focuses primarily on American politics and life in the 60's.

It is 1960, the end of the comfortable Eisenhower years and the beginning of the ruthlessly competitive Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign. Mary van der Linden has recently moved from London to Washington D.C with her two children and her husband Charlie, who is posted to the British embassy. In her forties, Mary is a loving mother, wife and friend who has loyally devoted her entire life to other people. But when Frank Renzo suddenly appears- a handsome down to earth journalist- she seems to forget this and is drawn into the Bohemian world of Greenwich Village. Mary is drawn to the rawness of New York City; after all it is the swinging sixties and what is better than jazz clubs, Miles Davis records and gritty bookstores? Mary finds excuses to be with her lover in New York while back in Washington her alcoholic husband drinks to forget his paranoia with the interfering Russians, his absent wife and his state of depression.

Faulks breaks new grounds with this novel. Unlike his previous works, this is not a war story and is not set in Europe. Faulks has an easy, approachable writing style and explores the themes of the 60's beautifully. Although not as enthralling as Birdsong or Charlotte Grey, this is great novel and will easily entertain all readers. Just be warned: the political jargon is rather heavy so if you're looking for a love story this is probably not it.

Set after WWI in a small town in France, this somewhat bleak and heart-wrenching novel covers a number of months in the life of a beautiful Parisian girl who has changed her name to protect herself from the potential damage a family secret could cause her. Anna Louvet arrives in Janvilliers to work as the waitress at the small Hotel du Lion d'Or, perhaps to escape her loneliness and hoping to find happiness (love?). At the Hotel her supervisor is a fat, bitter matron, the chef a drunk, an errand boy a peeping tom, and the owner of the hotel a small fearful man - perhaps shelled-shocked after the war. Desperately lonely, she falls in love with one of the hotel bar's patrons, a married man named Hartmann and the novel is primarily about their brief affair (the book ends in a strange episode in Paris just after Hartmann rejects (breaks up with) Anna. Faulks is an exquisite writer and his prose is beautiful - the story however, is simply too bleak. I found the characters wrapped a little too tightly, with too many emotional hang-ups (do people still used this word?) for my taste. I found the description of Anna's 'family secret' rather fascinating and I was almost more moved by that then by the conjugal issues that Hartmann had or the personal issues that Anna seemed to be suffering. This is perhaps due to the author's attempts to place us into the hearts and minds of the French in the 1930s - and as an American in the 2000s - perhaps I should be judging my own (in)ability to better understand these characters. It is a beautiful quiet little novel - and extremely well written - but simply too frustrating emotionally for my liking.

Sebastian Faulks writes a moving story that takes place in the 1930s about a young woman with a secret so terrible that she has had to change her identity. She has come from Paris to a small seaside village of Janvilliers, to work at the Hotel du Lion d'Or. Upon arriving she meets and falls in love with a married man, Charles Hartmann, and the story follows their affair to its eventual break-up at the end of the book. The story is well written, beautiful and romantic and the characters and settings are very detailed. My only criticism of this book is that Faulks leaves many loose ends...characters and plot lines that are part of the story, disappear, never be seen or heard from again, leaving several story lines hanging. For those looking for passion and romance, love and loss, this is the book for you.

This book varies hugely from the action in both Birdsong and Charlotte Gray but is still to date the best novel that Faulks has penned. He has the amazing ability to create characters that seem so real they could almost be your neighbours. In Anne there is a true victim but her robust attitude to all the trouble the world throws at her is inspiring. I have read.. and re read this book and each time I discover a new and very varied angle or character. This novel has not the profile or impact of Birdsong but it contains an elequence that is so often lacking in modern novels today. Faulks is not afraid to put characters at the centre of his novel and for this he should be aplauded. Read this book and fall in love with France, I feel like I am actually watching an art house European film when I read it.

I couldn't resist picking up this novel after reading the back cover. A young Scottish woman (Charlotte) follows her downed pilot lover (Peter Gregory) to France as a Secrete SOE-type agent to help the French Resistance, and perhaps even rescue Peter. The plot sounds very intruiging...unfortunately, the author didn't pull it off nearly as well as he could have. Peter Gregory dissapears somewhere over France at the very beginning, and has very little to do with the remainder of the book. He's just sort of gone. Charlotte, in France all because of Peter, doesn't seem to have the passionated motivation to find him that I would have expected. Instead, she finds Julian, a member of the Resistance who develops an attraction to her. And yet she keeps herself unattatched (for the most part). Meanwhile a subplot about two young Jewish boys in hiding develops, abut the main characters have relatively little to do with them...and a depressing subplot it is. Faulks knows how to develop drama in a sweeping-type story, but the story itself felt fragmented, like a bunch of different pieces that didn't completely come together. On the other hand, the material was well-researched (through interviews of real people) and though fictional it was historically accurate. kudos

I have had to reflect upon Faulks' 'Charlotte Gray' for some time to refrain from critcising it unduly. This is, quite genuinely, a convincing and well-woven story that will greatly appeal to first time readers of Faulks, yet still it may be a slight disappointment to those who have read 'Birdsong'.

In itself, 'Charlotte Gray' is an accomplished novel by a gifted storyteller. - Our eponymous heroine is a complex and fairly intriuging lady, but in my opinion was less well conceived than the characters who accompany her in wartime France. The Jewish father and son, who aid Charlotte in the Resistance and in her search for her missing lover, are particularly compelling.

In criticism, the concentration camps present in 'Charlotte Gray' would have benefited from the visceral style Faulks' employed in his description of the First World War trenches of 'Birdsong'. Unfortunately, the horrors of the Second World War are not described with the clarity or power present in his earlier book.

This one was my personal favorite of the trilogy. Eventhough I felt little connection with Charlotte, her perils kept me reading. The subplot of Andre, Jacob and Levade certainly stole the show. Faulks seems always to beautifully represent unjust and tragic contrasts of society during war. The historical detail is rich and convincing. I wish he would now write from a Jewish perspective.

It is hard for me to believe this book was written by the same author of Charlotte Gray and Birdsong! I am struggling to finish this book knowing full well that it is not going to improve one iota.

I find the characters weak and uninteresting. The affair between the faithful wife and this WWII veteran from Chicago turned journalist is hard to imagine.

This book is genuinely boring. How many bars, restaurants, geographic locations and prominent landmarks do we need to read about. Who cares! So the author is well travelled. This is an unimportant book.

There is not much else to say other than I truly believe this was written by someone other than Faulks or that he has lost what I found superb in Birdsong.

Very moody, atmospheric, with an underlying sense of foreboding. It makes me want to learn more about the early days of the Cold War. There's a scene of reporters covering the big election night that made me understand how difficult "up to the minute" reporting must have been back in 1960. The election was still neck and neck but they had to go to press and were forced to make educated decisions about where things were headed. They literally were not sure if their morning headline was going to ultimately be correct!

(By the way -- if you haven't read the book yet, beware of that extremely lengthy review from NYC because it's full of spoilers that would really mar your appreciation of the book.)

The U-2 incident. The Kennedy-Nixon debates. Smoky Greenwich Village bars and cool jazz (the book's title comes from a Miles Davis album). Do those seem like ancient history? Not to me. There's history --- and then there is History. The former is the kind you lived through; the latter happened before you were born. So it was a shock to realize that ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET, which opens in 1959, when I was 14, is a legitimate historical novel and it is tempting to be especially picky about the way Sebastian Faulks, an Englishman, goes about authenticating a period I think of as my private property.

The story centers on Charlie van der Linden, a diplomat assigned to the British embassy in Washington, D.C. and his wife, Mary. Around them swirls a Cold War aura of suspicion and a giddy Eisenhower-era enthusiasm for big cars, family values and lots of scotch. It's an uneasy mix that becomes even less stable when Frank Renzo, an American newspaper reporter, shows up at one of the van der Lindens' parties. Not only do he and Mary start an affair, but he and Charlie are, in a way, on parallel tracks: both have troubling memories of World War II and both were at Dien Bien Phu, the last stand of defeated French colonialism in Vietnam. But Charlie is visibly self-destructing: he drinks his life away ("He barely had hangovers anymore, just days of gastric terror and mental absence") and his outlook is suicidally bleak. Frank, though temporarily blackballed for suspect liberal sympathies, is fighting his way back to journalistic legitimacy; covering the presidential campaign is his big chance. He is based in New York and the two cities are an interesting contrast: the pristine surfaces of Washington, the down-and-dirty vitality of Manhattan.

The '50s and early '60s are trendy these days, what with Oscar-nominated movies like Far From Heaven and The Hours. And, as in the careful, self-conscious art direction of these films --- the vintage car rolling slowly across the screen --- the period details in ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET at first seem intrusive. We are regaled with descriptions of food (including "Salteen" crackers) and clothing (ads for Triumph Foundation Garments). An entire page is given over to Pennsylvania Station, which was torn down in a passion of urban renewal before New York awoke to the glories of older architecture. There are some heavy-handedly ironic winks and nudges, too, as when Frank thinks "the panic over the identity of the potential vice-president was morbid when Kennedy himself was so young" or he remarks of Vietnam, "We never could get American readers interested in that place."

Fortunately, the characters soon take over. Although Frank and Charlie have an attractive, Graham Greene-esque world-weariness and Mary seems initially to be one of those women trapped in housewifery, consumerism and motherhood (the very model for Betty Friedan's THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE), she turns out to be the most interesting of the three. Self-observing, imaginative and intelligent, she is nearly overwhelmed by the burdens of family love (the passages concerning her mother's death are among the strongest in the book) and the cold facts of mortality: "Only people in their wretched middle age had to face the truth, Mary thought; the slipped responsibilities of the old and young were hers alone to bear." At the same time, she is dazzled by the passion she feels for Frank, a love that seems to exist outside of time (an illusion sustained by the fact that the liaison is conducted almost entirely in New York) and drawn to the freedom he represents. Whether she will seize her opportunity for escape is a question that remains open to the very end of ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET.

The convergence of love and war (in this case more cold than hot) is familiar territory for Faulks, whose brilliant World War II trilogy (THE GIRL AT THE LION D'OR, BIRDSONG, CHARLOTTE GRAY) combines a powerful romantic streak with details of crushing realism, a sense of destiny with a sense of futility. Mary and Frank's relationship is a given, like a hurricane or tidal wave; it doesn't seem to suffer from the slings and arrows that ordinary lovers are constantly ducking. Yet for Mary it also represents a rediscovery of herself --- something she thought she'd lost forever with the death of her first sweetheart, David, in the war --- and in her moral conflict and emotional daring, she emerges as a woman of tremendous complexity and heart.

As the personal story gathers momentum, the political context seems to lose some of its stage-set stiffness. Faulks's account of the campaign, debate and election night is genuinely thrilling, even though we know how it will come out. The scenes at Dien Bien Phu prefigure the war that nobody wanted and the flashbacks to World War II recall the savagery of the war that everybody seems to agree was necessary. There is a cosmic sadness to these events, as if Faulks and his melancholy heroes are grieving in advance for greater troubles to come.

Frank and Charlie monopolize the politics; Mary relates to the wider world almost exclusively through the two men. While that may be accurate in terms of the role women were expected to play 40 years ago, it splits the book down the middle: Faulks never quite manages to fuse his story of love and personal transformation with the currents of social change. Nonetheless, ON GREEN DOLPHIN STREET is an absorbing, sometimes transporting novel. Once I got off my "I was there" high horse, I realized that it captures much of the pace and music and swelling bohemianism of New York when I was young, as well as the mood of expectation that swept us: the country holding its breath, wondering what would happen next.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman