It is 1980, and Caroline Landry has arrived in London to do research on a long-forgotten writer. But the last thing she wants is to sit for hours at a desk in the British Library. Eight years ago she fell in love with London on a college trip, guided by a magnetic teacher, and the city has come to represent everything this bookish young professor loves. But her research will take her places she could never have imagined, into a world far more interesting than she hopes.

Caroline is an assistant professor at a small state university in Barston, Louisiana. She needs to write a scholarly book to secure her job and thinks the right subject might be Emerald Glover, an American who published four novels in England in the 1920s and 1930s but then disappeared. Otherwise Caroline knows little about her, apart from the facts that she might be from Louisiana and she once attended a party with the Bloomsbury Group.

But her literary research is not as important for Caroline as being in London, where the very air is stimulating and every moment yields something of interest. It is the other side of the world from Barston. Along with colleagues from the English Department-an assortment of characters led by the new anxiety-producing department chair recently arrived from the East-she settles in at a quirky Bloomsbury hotel. Everyone but Caroline seems to know exactly what they are doing.

So begins this delightful novel, where the reader experiences a time and place through the eyes of a sharply observant, wryly humorous narrator. In clear, often elegant prose, the author, herself an ardent traveler and author of several books on art history, shows how chance meetings and openness to experience can transform one’s view of the world.