The Love Germ: A Novel

Place: Latin Quarter, Paris. Date: May 1968. Cast: Polly, Giorgio, Jane, Anna, Arthur and a thousand rioting students. Plot: Polly accepts that it takes love to make a revolution, even if it arrives in the shambolic form of Giorgio, an Italian anarchist with a pimply back and a mean line in rebel rousing. Giorgio discovers that the sunglasses everyone is wearing on the street are also de rigeur in the waiting room of the clap clinic. Anna finds that with her old friend Gottlieb, one plus one, far from making two, or ideally three, makes only zero. And Jane decides that as she is constantly being accused of adultery, she might as well give it a go … Meanwhile, over at the Sorbonne, a crowd debates late into the night urgent questions of romance and revolt, and how they intertwine.