A cabinet-level presidential appointment precipitates a personal crisis for Ansel Gibbs, a man of sophistication, breeding and sensitivity whose return to public life from retirement frames Buechner’s meditation on the courage required to assert one’s humanity in the modern world.

Winner of the Rosenthal Award

“Mr. Buechner has written an extraordinarily dramatic story.”–Charles Poore, The New York Times

“This is a mature piece of work.”–Literary News

“Mr. Buechner casts his own particular, brilliantly indirect illumination on a private world that is luxurious, comfortable, furnished with intelligence and a certain charm, possessed of intense loyalty to itself and its members, and generous, with polite and sensible reservations, to outsiders.”–The New Yorker