The two central characters are Robert Kincaid, a free-lance photographer, and Francesca Johnson, a farm wife living in Madison County, Iowa. The entire novel revolves around their meeting and subsequent four-day "affair" during mid-August 1965.

Robert Kincaid was born in Barnsville, Ohio and was the only child of a couple now both deceased. In the 1950s he married Marian, a coffee-house folk singer in Seattle fourteen years his junior. After five years the union collapsed under the pressures brought about by his frequent absences as a traveling photographer, and for the past nine years he has lived alone at his home base in Bellingham, Washington. Other than his profession, his life as a loner is the central fact of his character.

He learned photography in the Army and at first plied his trade in New York City doing fashion work until he discovered that the confinement of the city...