The year is 1970, and it's a long, hot summer. In a castle on a mountainside in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on a sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution.

The girls are acting like boys, the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing—twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel—is struggling to twist feminism and women's ascendancy toward his own ends.