Fluke

President Harding’s young mistress narrates her life in the shadows of political corruption in this historical novel “of considerable dash and charm” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

President Warren G. Harding was a strikingly handsome man with little political ambition. But in the United States, anyone can be president—especially during the chicanery of the Roaring Twenties.

At the center of his presidency was the young Nan Britton. Although she was only half his age, their passionate affair began in 1917 in a New York hotel room, and continued for six and a half years during his time in the Senate and then in the White House. Harding and Britton kept the affair secret, meeting in closets and private offices, including a small anteroom in the West Wing. Eventually, they conceived a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, born in October 1919.

Fluke is a story of corruption, obsessive love, a doomed presidency, and the lengths a woman will go to support the man she loves. Before Lucy Mercer, Kay Summersby, and Monica Lewinsky, there was Nan Britton, whose stories of carnal adventures in the White House coat closet scandalized the nation.