In the pre-Katrina boom days of 2005, executive consultant Jim Wright was dispatched to a community college in El Pequeno, a middling town located in the backwaters of California's Central Valley. His mission: to parlay a perfunctory "technology assessment" stint into a lucrative long-term management contract for his firm. To Jim, experienced, wily, charismatic, the assignment seemed a piece of cake. He couldn't have been more wrong.

Three years later, the boom over, his career and life in shambles, Jim sits at home in Greensboro, North Carolina, awaiting with mixed feelings the imminent visit of two former Pequeno colleagues: Mina Hussein, with whom he has remained on friendly email terms, and Grace Kirchner, once Jim's fervent admirer, pet and object of forbidden desire, who mysteriously cut off contact after resigning from the college.

While the two young women drive from California to North Carolina, and Jim follows their progress on Google Maps, all three are forced to revisit their memories of the fateful year they worked together, puzzling out professional challenges, political intrigues and personal entanglements, in the process exploring the conflicts between corporate logic and ethical imperatives, and coming to grips with the meaning of love.

Having spent a gloomy semester in Paris as a student long ago, Franny Laforet is one Californian who doesn't harbor any romantic notions about France. All the same, she finds herself drafted as scout for a group of friends planning a reunion at a Provencal chateau. Her plane unfortunately lands at De Gaulle at the time of the attack on the World Trade Center. With the rest of the group stuck back home due to the cancellation of transatlantic flights, Franny seems fated to a lonely vacation spent exploring the countryside around the chateau and speculating about the natives. The natives meanwhile have their own preoccupations. The chatelain himself, Hughes Degency, an ex-banker struggling to establish an organic winery, has been reduced to camping out in the woods while he rents his posh residence to Americans he detests. Franny and Hughes soon discover that national antagonism is no obstacle to sexual attraction. Serendipity eventually fills the chateau with a mixture of French and American guests whose intentions are not uniformly honorable. Amidst the ensuing bustle, cross-cultural debates and nefarious schemes, the would-be lovers will have a very short time to work out their feelings.