From Paris in the 1920s to London after the Blitz, two women find that a secret from their past reverberates through years of joy and sorrow....
As recovery from World War II begins, expat American Nora Tours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. There, she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts to survive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter's life. Lee suffers from what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.
Nora and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920s Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee's magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will Nora's reunion with Lee give them a chance to forgive past betrayals...and break years of silence to forge a meaningful connection as women who have shared the best and the worst that life can offer?
A novel of freedom and frailty, desire and daring, "The Beautiful American" portrays the extraordinary relationship between two passionate, unconventional women.
Readers Guide Included

From Paris in the 1920s to London after the Blitz, two women find that a secret from their past reverberates through years of joy and sorrow.

As recovery from World War II begins, expatriate American Nora Tours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. There she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts to survive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter s life. Lee suffers from what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

Nora and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920s Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee s magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will Nora s reunion with Lee give them a chance to forgive past betrayals and break years of silence to forge a meaningful connection as women who have shared the best and the worst that life can offer?

A novel of freedom and frailty, desire and daring, "The Beautiful American" portrays the extraordinary relationship between two passionate, unconventional women."

From Paris in the 1920s to London after the Blitz, two women find that a secret from their past reverberates through years of joy and sorrow.

As recovery from World War II begins, expatriate American Nora Tours travels from her home in southern France to London in search of her missing sixteen-year-old daughter. There she unexpectedly meets up with an old acquaintance, famous model-turned-photographer Lee Miller. Neither has emerged from the war unscathed. Nora is racked with the fear that her efforts to survive under the Vichy regime may have cost her daughter s life. Lee suffers from what she witnessed as a war correspondent photographing the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

Nora and Lee knew each other in the heady days of late 1920s Paris, when Nora was giddy with love for her childhood sweetheart, Lee became the celebrated mistress of the artist Man Ray, and Lee s magnetic beauty drew them all into the glamorous lives of famous artists and their wealthy patrons. But Lee fails to realize that her friendship with Nora is even older, that it goes back to their days as children in Poughkeepsie, New York, when a devastating trauma marked Lee forever. Will Nora s reunion with Lee give them a chance to forgive past betrayals and break years of silence to forge a meaningful connection as women who have shared the best and the worst that life can offer?

A novel of freedom and frailty, desire and daring, "The Beautiful American" portrays the extraordinary relationship between two passionate, unconventional women."

Culled from love letters, poetry, fiction, personal essays, and memoirs, this lavish and fascinating anthology celebrates humankind's grandest pastime and obsession: love.

How do we define love? "It feels like hunger pains, and we use the same word. Pang. Perhaps this is why Cupid is depicted with a quiver of arrows, because love feels at times like being pierced in the chest. It is a wholesome violence. . . . People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets." So writes Diane Ackerman in her insightful introduction.

Here is a panorama of fine writing about love's many moods and majesties, from all the veils of flirtation, seduction, and marriage to the tempests of suspicion, jealousy, and heartache. Here is a treasury of more than two hundred selectionsfrom Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?" There are excerpts from Romeo and Juliet, Madame Bovary, Justine, The Odyssey, Lady Chatterley's Lover, as well as the letters from Baudelaire to Sabatier, George Eliot to Herbert Spencer, and Henry Miller to Anaïs Nin.

General readers and scholars alike will delight in this anthology's mix of the contemporary and the classic.