Sons of Fortune

by Jeffrey Archer

First published 2003

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4.1(32,963)

Twin boys born in Hartford, Connecticut, are separated through a hospital mistake and raised in families with sharply different social and economic circumstances. Nat Cartwright grows up in a working household and develops a talent for banking, while Fletcher Davenport is raised within a professional and politically connected family and turns towards law. Neither knows that the other exists, although their lives repeatedly approach one another.

Their generation comes of age amid the civil-rights movement and the Vietnam War, and both men encounter military service, discrimination, marriage and public ambition. Their careers eventually lead them into opposing campaigns for political office, while a criminal accusation creates a further collision between their identities. The novel uses the separated-twins structure to compare class opportunity, moral choice and political power in post-war America.