The Invisible Circus

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 obsessed by the memory of her charismatic older sister, Faith, a flower child who died in Italy in 1970. Searching for the truth about her death and life, Phoebe follows Faith's trail from San Francisco through Europe, ending up in the very place where Faith leapt to her death. The truth that Phoebe discovers there is larger and darker than one death; it goes to the ambiguous heart of a generation that tried to follow its dreams of freedom, and reveals the complex and disturbing nature of those dreams.