For Dan, America has come to represent a kind of lost, earnest innocence: you can practically hear the fife-and-drum music in the background as he rolls into town for the reunion. No less rosy are his memories of his best friend, Gary, and his high-school sweetheart, Gloria, with whom he first coupled on Thomas Jefferson's bed at Monticello on a class field trip. "In my memory, Gloria and Monticello are for ever joined." But now she claims he fathered a daughter that fateful afternoon, a daughter who's been murdered by a serial killer. Meanwhile, Gary has gone off the deep end, convinced he's an Ojibway Indian and leading ceremonies in a tipi in his mom's backyard. Dan's attempt to reconcile his Edenic memories with the bitter realities wrought by 30 years of history yield a singularly woeful comic novel. At times Justin Cartwright's narrative seems filigreed with ideas and ironies; at other times it seems concerned, quite simply, with one man who learns that his "version of what goes on is certainly faulty." --Claire Dederer

What makes Cartwright's protagonists lively, multi-faceted and compelling is their acute and ashamed self-awareness. Both were attracted to power through "a desire for divinity" and as the media begin to control their every move, they recognise that fame and political success provide no protection. "Their love, which had seemed Olympian, had been directed down to street level". Like the war heroes of their past, their place in history becomes increasingly fragile as the affair and the attack accrue national curiosity and political repercussions.

Cartwright is a master at detailing the "amateur dramatic gothicness of Parliament" and the "range of small vanities" Richard enjoys. He also applies a shrewd satiric wit to the world of luvvies where champagne is the "PR antibiotic" and American English "more suited to the task at hand". As well as delivering a piercing critique of class and aspiration, Cartwright's delightfully urbane and fluid novel also investigates Englishness with the sharp, uncompromising eye of the outsider. "Englishness had become a self-parody", thinks Joanna, whose fame rests on "playing an icy English bitch ... a type that no longer existed outside films and plays". As the old certainties collapse around them, Richard and Joanna try to assemble a new code of nobility. Encumbered by values they once scorned, their journey from self-love to something more testing is extremely consoling, satisfying and humane. An excellent, highly contemporary novel about vanity and seduction. --Cherry Smyth