World's End: by Upton Sinclair.

This is the beginning of a series of books, about the world with Europe centre stage with time spanning from end of world war I to cold war.

A young boy who is coming of age as the first war, then called the great war, is ending, and he happens to be in place where he can be useful as an interpreter - his father is from a US family with a gun manufacture business, and the mother - Beauty Budd, Budd being the name of the family that no one can be sure she legally does have a right to, but most find it more convenient not to challenge her on the point - living in southern coastal France is from US too, a beauty and an ex-model who worked with artists including her own brother in Paris before having a son.

Lanny Budd is growing up with Riviera for home and Europe for a playground, and the education he receives from various sources - his New England austere and wealthy Budd family, his mother with her genial and loving, kind and compassionate character and her coterie of friends who are wealthy and of upper class; his friends from England and Germany, whom he has mutual visits with, and his extended family with various half brothers and sisters, is all giving him a base from which he grows to be a man of education and learning and a good conscience and a good heart. He is the protagonist and in some sense the soul of the world he inhabits where much is to happen - and the future of humanity is at stake.

This is the first volume of the series that has ten volumes or eleven in all - I always forget the number but do wish one day to have them to read again. It was fortunate to stumble across them in the first place, in a library that was a refuge and a retreat all those years, and incidentally is now a landmark and a preserved heritage structure.