This is no chance meeting. Thomas learned that Linda was reading at the festival and chose this moment to reestablish contact with a woman he passionately pursued years earlier. Their affair was disastrous, and a turning point in both their lives. Neither the intensity of their relationship nor the damage it did has ever been far from his memory.

From the moment they speak, The Last Time They Met unfolds the story of Linda and Thomas in an extraordinary way, with unshakable immediacy: it travels back into their past -- Africa, when Linda and Thomas were twenty-seven; Massachusetts, when they were in high school -- bypassing layers of memory and interpretation to present their earlier encounters.

The novel recreates love at its exhilarating pinnacle -- the kind of intense connection that becomes the true north against which all relationships are measured.