This autobiographical novel tells the story of a young woman who will one day be a writer, growing up in the 1920s -- in a world at one moment bright with grace and pleasure, at the next bewildering and dark -- and of the lives that touch and color hers. It begins in the Grand Duchy of Baden, in a small chateau threadbare after the First World War. Here the narrator's father, who was himself raised "not exactly to money but to the sweetness of life," instructs the solitary child (her mother absent, having taken a lover) in decorums already vanishing. It is an education suddenly deflected to the dazzling Italian countryside, to the company of the clever, beautiful, and seductive mother who is the lodestar of the narrator's young life, by turns embracing her daughter, banishing her to England and the generosity of others, and calling her back -- now no longer to Italy but to Sanary, on the Mediterranean coast of France, where the painter Moïse Kisling and Aldous Huxley are among those who capture the girl's imagination and her heart. Finally, we see her as she approaches her twenty-first year, making her way through a society of worldly intelligence whose emotional agenda is far less simple than it seems--Adapted from information provided by publisher.