Wharton's eighth novel is an exquisite love story set in Paris in 1975. Jack, a 49-year-old American, has walked out on his lucrative corporate career and troubled marriage to return to his first love, painting. He lives a disciplined, hand-to-mouth existence, struggling to express his long-suppressed feelings in his paintings. While working in a park and blocking the sidewalk, an elderly blind woman walks into him, knocking him off his feet and getting herself smeared with paint. Mirabelle, 71, speaks precise, almost aristocratic English and is elegant and radiant. They fall slowly in love. Mirabelle's tremendous sense of life inspires Jack to paint with new vigor and freedom, while in his company she blossoms, loving for the first time since the traumatic event that blinded her in her youth. They live in an enchanted world of pure communion, bliss, beauty, and magic. ISBN 0-374-18389-9: $18.95.

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