The high ideals and inevitable compromises of the 1960's form the background to this acclaimed first novel. Phoebe O'Connor, eighteen years old in the summer of 1978, is too young to know the 1960s, but old enough to feel its influences. Living in San Francisco with her widowed mother, Phoebe is obsessed with the memory of her charismatic older sister, Faith, a flower child who died in 1970. Searching for the truth about her death and life, Phoebe follows Faith's trail from San Francisco through Europe, culminating in the very place where she leapt to her death. The truth that Phoebe discovers is larger and darker than one death; it goes to the ambiguous heart of a generation that tried to follow its dreams of freedom, only to defer those dreams.