Picking up her story in the late '60s at age 21, Cathy Gildiner whisks the reader through five years and three countries, beginning as a poetry student at Oxford and extending to London's swinging Carnaby Street, the mountains of Wales and a posh country estate. Cathy later returns to Cleveland, Ohio, which was still reeling from the Hough Ghetto Riots. In 1970, Cathy moves to Canada , where she rooms with members of the FLQ (Quebec separatists) and then with one of the biggest drug dealers in Canada. Along the way, she falls in love with the man who is now her husband.