The Wonderful Year

Martin Overshaw, a young Englishman who has come to Paris in August with no notion what to do with his life, dines with an old friend, Corinna Hastings, who is just as adrift — and the evening sets off the most unexpected year either of them has known. William Locke wrote sentimental comedies that sold enormously; this one, published in 1916, takes its people out of the Latin Quarter into provincial France and on into the war, with a hard little argument inside it about what a settled life costs. Fifty-eight plates, among them Corot and Delacroix, follow the roads, letters and dispatches of the France Overshaw crosses.