Foreign bodies

The collapse of her brief marriage has stalled Bea Nightingale´s life, leaving her middle-aged and alone, teaching in an impoverished borough of 1950s New York. A plea from her estranged brother gives Bea the excuse to escape lassitude by leaving for Paris to retrieve a nephew she barely knows; but the siren call of Europe threatens to deafen Bea to the dangers of entangling herself in the lives of her brother´s family. Travelling from America to France, Bea leaves the stigma of divorce on the far side of the Atlantic; newly liberated, she chooses to defend her nephew and his girlfriend Lili by waging a war of letters on the brother she has promised to help. But Bea´s generosity is a mixed blessing: those she tries to help seem to be harmed, and as Bea´s family unravel from around her, she finds herself once again drawn to the husband she thought she had left in the