A fantastically evocative portrait of Paris and all its charms, in the 1920s, the 1960s, and today, as the story follows a contemporary woman and her great-uncle on their parallel journeys

Carly is a 30-year old life coach with no clue as to which direction any life should take, including her own. Her boyfriend of nine years, Simon, is neurotic and emotionally overbearing. With his latest venture into a self-help cult called Morningside, his behavior becomes even more peculiar and secretive, until Carly convinces herself that he is planning a surprise wedding. And indeed he is—he suddenly marries one of the other Morningside cult members, disappearing on an impromptu honeymoon to Paris, and taking along with him Carly's recent gift from a deceased great-uncle—an unpublished memoir of his time in Paris during the 1920s. What do Simon and Morningside want with it? Why has he taken it to Paris? Woven into Carly's story are two others—that of her great-uncle as he returns to Paris in the 1960s after an absence of nearly 40 years and struggles to remember his youth there in the 1920s, and the other, of course, is his memoir of that extraordinary period itself, spent among the famous expatriates of the day, from the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.