Cynthia F. Davidson came of age in the vibrant city of Beirut, Lebanon, once known as the Paris of the Middle East. But when civil war breaks out in 1975, this young American woman and her expatriate family are caught in the crosshairs. After her sister is shot and her father kidnapped, the violence makes it impossible for Cynthia to return to Lebanon and reconcile her losses there.

On a quest to understand Beirut’s demise, Cynthia moves to Paris, France in 1984. There, she attempts to chronicle what happened in Lebanon through the life story of Georgina Rizk, a young Lebanese refugee and the Arab world’s first and only Miss Universe. Through a series of tumultuous love affairs, friendships, and fraught encounters with Georgina in the City of Light, Cynthia realizes that in trying to tell another’s story, she needs to face the hardest truths about her own.