This is a book about varieties of desire. Its heroine is a painter, Georgia Whyte, an American who has fled the turbulence of Los Angeles and Chicago for the anonymity of Europe. In Paris, she succeeds in living by her heart, expecting there will be a price and wondering what that price will be.

Georgia's story is told through the ironic eyes of an old friend, another American in Paris, a writer who long ago lost his idealism but remembers it all too well. Once again, in Ambition & Love Ward Just moves easily between Old World and New, from his own native Midwest to the Paris he has come to know so intimately and about which he writes more evocatively than any other living American.

In Georgia Whyte he has given us a heroine who is both a classic and an original, an American who seeks the spiritual fire of Europe while managing to preserve a fierce integrity. She works in obscurity and she finds the unexpected reward of love.

1. In the words of Newsweek, Ward Just "has earned a place on the shelf just below Edith Wharton and Henry James." This, his tenth novel, is a story as trenchant and worldly as his readers have come to expect, and yet surprisingly romantic as well.