In her first novel, Gay Walley weaves two stories into a seamless narrative--a woman's quest for love, and the drunken, vagabond childhood she endured with her father.

Raised on a barstool, Charlee spends her youth drinking in the dark dives of New England and Montreal with a father who flees from woman to woman. As an adult, in one of her father's haunts, she encounters the man whose flaws and attractions will make her face every emotion that confounded her dad. She longs for companionship, but from her father she has learned to trust only her own will and crave solitude. Can she...