Heloise and Bellinis

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This charmingly inventive, deliciously improbable seriocomic novel opens at eleven o'clock in the morning of July 14 in the year 2000 on the Avenue d'Angleterre in Beirut. Private George Smith of the American Peace-Keeping Forces in Lebanon is breathlessly chasing a hand grenade—which he threw in the line of duty—down the street. It seems he forgot to pull the pin. At that very moment, one Heloise Svejk is crossing the street from east to west, bearing an empty coffin on her shoulder. From this unlikely encounter is born one of the great love stories of the first year of the twenty-first century, not completely unworthy of that of Heloise's namesake nine centuries earlier.<br><br>Private Smith is a reasonably sane soldier, as sane at least as any oversized American of mixed Swedish and Austro-Hungarian descent from Alabama who has not been with a beautiful for two years can be. Now Smith knows, inevitably and irrevocably, why fate has...