The last word anyone would use to describe Stella St. Vincent is adventurous. She's perfectly comfortable with the familiar strict routines of her life as a copyeditor in New York. That is until she receives a mysterious note from her late mother and a one-way plane ticket to Paris. Alone and overwhelmed in a foreign city Stella avoids new people and ventures out as little as possible. But then she meets Jules an octogenarian art collector with very different ideas about how she should spend her time. And to start with there's a vintage Dior dress with her name on it. Somewhere between the cramped shelves of Shakespeare and Company bookshop and the crisp tablecloths of the Brasserie Les Deux Magots long-buried truths about Stella's own past begin to emerge. Maybe there’s more to her mother's suggestion than she first suspected. . .