<p>Grace and Favors tells the story of two unusual young people, victims in different ways of the times they were born into yet with the courage and the capacity to breach the barriers and thus become icons of a special moment. Paris in the wake of the Second World War was such a place at such a time. It was an &ldquo;anything is possible&rdquo; moment. New bridges, strong ideals, renewed strength&mdash;all seemed within reach.</p>

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<p>The two young protagonists are Riccardo, a gifted young Italian painter who had suffered fascism and the fight against it almost from birth, and Marisa, an even younger American girl who finds herself alone in every sense but who comes to Paris to learn to be a journalist and thus to make sense of the world that had orphaned her while no one was looking.</p>

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<p>Grace and Favors tells the story of how two attractive loners come together like pieces of a puzzle and prevail against the strictures of the past in a Paris ready for redemption.</p>

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<p>This is a cautionary tale told with humor and indulgence by the author of In Search of Mihailo, who remembers the sites, the scents, the places, and the tastes of a world reborn, the postwar years in Paris.</p>