Provincial France, winter 1961. Louise, innocent American student in flight from her demanding family, falls in love with Wally, gregarious Algerian factory worker, in flight from brutal colonial war. Romance blossoms in a chilly furnished room. But when their son is born, Louise abandons the child to her lover and his family, and gets on with her life. Forty years later, she seeks to make amends, but it¿s too late, as she learns from a sympathetic Algerian in exile from his country¿s 1990¿s civil war. Guantanamo, the Iraq war, the war on terror, haunt this lucid, often funny novel, where the personal and the political meld in surprising ways.