Paris after the Second World War: the Left Bank, Montmartre and Picasso's dove. Wanlaya is a Thai music student with challenging ideas and challenged friends, all engaged in their own ways in a search for the true values of life. The meaning of art, the birth of music, the evil of elitist education, the value of work, women's liberation: this swinging, iconoclastic novel of ideas, published in the early 1950s but only read twenty years later, has inspired Thai progressive circles ever since, and remains a hymn to life clamouring for change and ringing with the hopes and generosity of youth. By the author of Ghosts (TMC 16)