An engaging and hilarious novel that begins in August in Washington, D.C.-- in an election year-- and a twenty-eight-year-old campaign staffer whose life is about to veer wildly off course.  Melanie has the job of her dreams and the (married) man of her dreams. She's helping to run the communications outfit of Democrat John Hillman's presidential campaign and she's having a romance with Washington's most powerful political journalist, Rick Stossel. In one of life's unhappy coincidences, a group called Citizens for Clear Heads emerges out of nowhere with scandalous information about her candidate at the same time as The Washington Post's gossip columnist begins calling her friends to try to sniff out details of her affair.  When her world starts to fall apart, Melanie finds herself willing to sacrifice all of her long-held ideals to keep it together. When it falls apart anyway, she has to find a way to make her own life meaningful and leave the fate of the free world to someone else.  Dog Days is a wry and sexy story of the young movers and shakers in D.C.-the most idealistic, cynical, cutthroat, and comical characters you'd ever want to sit next to at a dinner party-from a stylish new comic voice who knows her turf inside out.