Nothing about the romance between Nancy Hatch Dupree and Louis Dupree was what you'd call typical. For starters, there were the lovers themselves. Louis was a foul-mouthed paratrooper turned swashbuckling archaeologist. Nancy was a witty travel writer and the wife of a CIA station chief on the ragged frontier of the Cold War. Then there was the place and time: Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1960s, a heady and short-lived milieu of conniving spies, future mujahideen, and cocktail-swilling cosmopolitans.

It was there that Nancy and Louis fell in love not only with each other, but also with Afghanistan itself. The country was as exceptional and difficult as they were - and when it descended into chaos, they had no choice but to follow it. In Love and Ruin, journalist James Verini travels to Afghanistan in search of the Duprees' story, an exhilarating and heartbreaking tale of lives lived to the fullest in one of the world's most fascinating and forbidding places.