Tenderness

Summary: "From the Booker-longlisted author of Unexploded comes the story of a famed novelist living in exile and the most memorable first lady to ever enter the White House, bonded through time and space by a subversive literary masterpiece that would come to shape history ... It's 1928, in the blazing heat of the Italian Riviera, and D.H. Lawrence struggles to breathe. Stricken with tuberculosis, he lives in exile from Britain after the public outrage over his salacious novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover. His memories drift back into the glittering years of the roaring 20s and to the crisp white winter of 1915 spent in the Sussex countryside. Unhappily married, he cannot shake the memory of the enigmatic woman he met that winter, on whom he would later base his most beloved protagonist, the wild and free-loving Constance Reid--the infamous Lady Chatterely herself. Thirty years later, Jackie Onassis finds herself trapped in a fraught marriage, consumed by rumours of extramarital affairs. Looking for an escape, she gets her hands on Lawrence's contraband novel. Jackie is instantly and completely enamoured by the lust-filled pages and his story of a love affair free of politics--so much so that she turns her attention away from the 1960s election and to a new cause: liberating Lawrence's still-controversial novel from the shackles of obscenity laws and bringing his radical views to the world. An evocative account of two revolutionaries worlds apart, connected in their fight for free-love, Constance pulls back the curtain and shows us the human struggle that lies beneath their celebrity status. Lawrence's path to exile and Jackie's rise to becoming the most scrutinized First Lady are interwoven to tell a story of heartbreak and redemption that moves between the 1920s and 1960s, from America to England to Italy to and back again."--