Written by a young soldier in 1976 Cold War West Germany and forgotten for forty years, it glows as fresh today as it was when I composed it in Paris and Heidelberg and other European cities where I traveled in my old orange VW as a single, adventuresome young man. Like many soldiers far from home, I was having the time of my life but idn't know it. I was homesick, and spent many evenings going back to our headquarters in an old Hitler-era kaserne or barracks to lose myself in writing poetry and fiction. This novel was a nostalgic, melancholy, but passionate retrospection to the New England college town where I grew up. It's fiction - but who knows what tendrils of truth, remembrance, and long ago loves sprang up in the soil of imagination. This romantic coming of age novel tells of the passionate love affair etween a 23-year-old idealistic, talented poet and a beautiful, neglected young married woman in a New England college town set in 1973. The story has waited forty years, and is taking a little time to blossom, like a fine wine uncorked after decades. The companion volume of poetry is Cymbalist Poems, and the two novels have been reunited (twins separated at birth) in the book titled 27duet.