Madeleine and Jane, both in their early twenties, arrive separately in Manhattan in January 1968.

Jane is an aspiring writer seeking adventure, Madeleine, a fragile young woman fleeing an erotic nightmare. They meet by chance and throw in as roommates, first in an East Village tenement and later, through a stroke of dubious luck, in the luxurious uptown apartment of a mysteriously absent woman. Together and apart, Madeleine and Jane encounter the terrors and excitements—muggings, drugs, sexual freedom and experimentation—that burgeoned in the New York of that era. As the two develop a wary friendship, a self-appointed therapist—one of those Nietzschean characters who sprang up like mushrooms in the soil of the sixties—becomes entangled in their lives and, ultimately, divides them.

In 1968, two revolutions were in progress, one political and the other sexual. Neither Madeleine nor Jane has much interest in the protests on the Columbia University campus, but both are caught up in the maelstrom of erotic energy swirling through the country and the world in those heady days. Jane survives a rough initiation into the realities of sex, but in the course of this adventure she makes a moral error that she will regret for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, Jane comes through her New York initiation with her future intact. Madeleine does not.

Sometimes it seems that the sixties never ended, but it was a different time—raw, dismaying, exhilarating. Madeleine and Jane brings it back.