When Jackie is twenty-one, she meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy at a dinner party in Georgetown. She is dreaming of France, of a life of freedom and adventure. She has won an internship at Vogue, and she thinks...

When Jackie is twenty-one, she meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy at a dinner party in Georgetown. She is dreaming of France, of a life of freedom and adventure. She has won an internship at Vogue, and she thinks Kennedy is not her kind of adventure: "Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy."

And yet there is his intelligence, his humor and drive, and the chemistry between them. He pursues her, then disappears, then pursues her again in a pattern of intimacy and distance. She doesn't fit in during a weekend at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, yet she overhears Jack's father, brother and Jack discussing her. After Jack wins a seat in the Senate, they marry, but the early years of marriage are lonely, and she is devastated when she sees Jack leave a party with a woman in a silver dress--and realizes everyone else has noticed too.

During the White House years, the love between two independent people deepens. Then, suddenly, we are in a convertible and a motorcade in Dallas, when violence strikes. "Three and a half seconds--that's all it was--a slivered instant between the first shot which missed the car, and the second shot which did not. If she had recognized the first sound for what it was. A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved."

We are with Jackie during the years of mourning, as her focus is always her children; then through the rise and death of Bobby Kennedy; her marriage to businessman Aristotle Onassis; her tenure as an editor at Doubleday; and the final years as a remarkable woman thinks about her life.

From the author of the "magical" (USA Today) Georgia, this spellbinding and deeply researched novel takes us into the heart and mind of one of the most famous women in history.