California Gold

Frank and Chrissy meet a couple of days into 1970. Frank O’Hara, with his Elvis T-shirt and slicked-back hair, has escaped England for adventure out west. As soon as someone tells him about a house in the desert two hours east of LA where the walls are curved and the glass shimmers, a house where Elvis and Priscilla Presley honeymooned only a few years before, Frank tells himself: I have to see this place.

When Chrissy, all blonde hair and oversized sunglasses, picks him up hitchhiking on the side of the road, it’s love at first sight. Weeks later they elope, setting out to build Mirage, an exact replica of Elvis and Priscilla’s mid-century honeymoon fantasy in a muddy English field. For the next forty years, Mirage will be home to three generations of the O’Hara family. But when your life is a sunny Californian dream raised in Britain, you start to wonder: where exactly do I belong?