Includes bibliographical references (pages 236-237) and index.

"In 1987, when Miranda France spent a year in Madrid as a student, the new freedoms of post-Franco Spain were intoxicating: divorce, regional languages, contraceptives, kissing in the street, even the public consumption of drugs had become legal. At the university where, in 1936, Republicans had fought Nationalists in hand-to-hand combat, girls with Snoopy folders now sat alongside men with well-washed hair and boat shoes. Yet Madrid was also a mecca for fiery South American communists and moody Basque nationalists. Against this background, Miranda France describes a love-affair with a Peruvian revolutionary as well as an eccentric cast of characters - landladies, roommates, neighbors, and fellow students."

"Then, in 1998, she returns to Spain to revisit the countryside, towns, and great cities of the central part of the country - Madrid, Toledo, Avila, Segovia, Salamanca - and to discover how much has changed in ten years. With the new prosperity, much has altered, and the old bargain between men and women is over. But many values have endured, as she learns from a private detective, a shepherd, various nuns, two belly dancers, and a Castilian separatist, among others."--Jacket.

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