The Pursuit of Happiness/The State of the Union by Douglas Kennedy

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS: Manhattan, Thanksgiving Eve, 1945. The war was over, and Eric Smythe’s party was in full swing. All his clever Greenwich Village friends were there. So too was his sister Sara — an independent, canny young woman, starting to make her way in the big city. And then in walked a gatecrasher, Jack Malone — a U. S. Army journalist just back from a defeated Germany, and a man whose world-view did not tally with that of Eric and his friends. Set amidst the dynamic optimism of postwar New York and the subsequent nightmare of the McCarthy witch-hunts, The Pursuit of Happiness is a great tragic love story; a tale of divided loyalties, decisive moral choices, and the random workings of destiny.

STATE OF THE UNION: Hannah Buchan thinks herself ordinary. She is not the revolutionary child that her painter mother and famous radical father had hoped for. Raised in the creative chaos of 1960s America, Hannah vows to reject her parents’ liberal lifestyle, and settles instead for typical family life in a nondescript corner of Maine.

But normality isn’t quite what Hannah imagined it would to be, and try as she might to fight it, the urge to rebel against the things that hem her in grows ever stronger. Eventually, a series of encounters puts Hannah in an exhilarating but dangerous position – one in which she never thought she would find herself.

For decades, this one transgression in an otherwise faultless life lies buried deep in the past, all but forgotten – until a turn of fate brings it crashing back into the limelight. As her secret emerges, Hannah’s life goes into freefall and she is left struggling against the force of the past.