Caroline

The year was 1960. The place, Paris. They met by chance on the street in front of the small hotel where they both had taken lodging-the author, an American newspaperman; and a pretty girl with light brown hair cropped short, unruly. Her voice was low pitched, her accent unmistakably English but modulated, restrained, an echo of class, though not of the working class. In profile the sharp line of her jaw tipped upward and her forehead, high and straight, offered a classical image of startling beauty and febrile intensity.

Her name was Caroline. For whatever reasons, or for no particular reason at all unless escape from unpleasantness and tedium was a reason, she and the author had drifted into this ancient city. Paris then was magic. Paris was that almost mythical idyll of youth and freedom, and Paris had seduced and bewitched them.

Thus begins Alan Littell's memoir of the early years of the girl he one day would marry, from her birth as a British colonial in Cairo in 1939 to their life together in the Europe, England and America of the 1960s.