The rise & fall of great powers

the long version

Enduring life in an isolated bookstore on the Welsh countryside, young American woman Tooly reflects on her childhood under the care of bandits before a long-lost boyfriend offers clues to help her with unanswered questions. Taken from home as a girl, Tooly found herself spirited away by a group of seductive outsiders, implicated in capers from Asia to Europe to the United States. But who were her abductors? Why did they take her? What did they really want? Now the American owner of an isolated bookshop in the Welsh countryside, Tooly conducts a life full of reading, but with few human beings. Books are safer than people, who might ask awkward questions about her life. Then startling news arrives from a long-lost boyfriend in New York, raising old mysteries and propelling her on a quest around the world in search of answers.