“A delightful and quirky coming-of-age, the meeting of American hippie, postwar Europe, the American military and spy culture–what a romp!”

Cover by Melody Paris.

Edited by Cynthia White
Cover by: Melody Paris

 A hopeless romantic on her first trip to Europe is ordered by her lewd, though sentimental, oft-drunken uncle to accompany one of his colleagues from Germany – where both men work for the army budget department – to Milan to retrieve a vintage Fiat.  On the return trip her traveling companion, an older gentleman, dies in the middle of the night and the Swiss police drag her in for questioning, demanding to know why she was traveling with a member of the CIA.  They order her to stick around for more questioning but she panics, fleeing the country in the aging fiat only to be told upon arriving to her uncle’s house that she has caused an international incident and must hide out for a few days in Paris with her uncle’s boss, an aging homosexual who reminds her of Truman Capote.

THE GRADUATION PRESENT is a comic romp through a still re-building Europe where Americans are like children at a formal dinner party – loathed for their bad manners but envied for the promise that their imaginations still hold.