In writing her first novel, "Adé: A Love Story," Rebecca Walker sought to understand a love affair she had with a man from a foreign, tribal culture and her painful realization that his life was not hers — that, in fact, she was running from who she was.

"I thought I could transgress any boundary," said the 44-year-old author and part-time Maui resident during a phone interview from Los Angeles."I had no hesitation in crossing into another country. I don’t know if it’s an American thing or a generational thing, but I thought I could do anything."

The daughter of "The Color Purple" writer Alice Walker and New York attorney Mel Leventhal, Walker came from an ethnically mixed marriage (and a broken one), graduated cum laude from Yale University, traveled, met a lot of people and lived in a number of places. She knew no limitations.

Walker and her young son moved to Maui some years ago to finish the novel. She said she felt the need to be on an island to inform her writing, and it worked. Now mother and son divide their time between Los Angeles and the Valley Isle.

In this compact, nuanced book, published in October by Little A/New Harvest, her protagonist, Farida, is a biracial child of privilege who just graduated from Yale. She is traipsing carelessly across Africa and has a love interest: a handsome Swahili carver and fisherman named Adé ("AH-day"), whom she meets on a remote Kenyan island.

Farida, by the way, is not the character’s real name; we are never told it. "I was taken with the idea that she was a blank … an empty space, a vacuum," said Walker, until Adé names her his "beautiful light."

The love story is limpidly told, sensual without in-your-face eroticism. Adé is the thoughtful, caring, faithful and articulate lover every woman is supposed to want. His family is kind and accepting. Farida feels as though she is "being slung over a warm hip for the rest of eternity."

But in writing "Adé," Walker — best known for teaching and writing memoirs, including "Black, White and Jewish" and "Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence" — had to negotiate treacherous waters. She did not want to contribute to the sea of clichéd "girl meets noble savage" stories that tread the surface of cross-cultural relationships but never plumb the depths.

Walker wanted to lay bare her own unmasking as, if not an ugly American, an American who may have looked like the people among whom she was living but did not think like them.

As Farida says after the reality of a war-torn country, inadequate medical care and tradition-bound Muslim family life begin to crash in on her, "I had done what I swore I would not do: I had romanticized Africa. I had accepted Adé’s life before I realized what it might mean for my own."

Walker said life in a sprawling extended family and an everybody-knows-you village has something to teach us. Farida has to learn that Adé is enmeshed in his community.

"That’s one thing that Americans might consider more deeply," she said. "We are part of our people. We are connected to our people, and we have to take those relationships a bit more seriously. There’s something about the strength of (traditional) communities that comes as a result of how deeply they believe when you connect with one, you connect with them all. It keeps the community stable."

In the end we know what happens to Farida — sort of — but not Adé. This isn’t your mother’s "Bridges of Madison County" with a 20-years-later denouement.

That was purposeful, said Walker, who had tried writing a version that returns to the village and rejected it. In the end, she said, the story is not the relationship, but Farida’s journey through and from it.

But, she admits, it might be a bit different in the movie.

Yes, movie. It was announced in March that pop music queen Madonna has bought the rights and plans to direct the film adaptation. Walker, who played a journalist in Mike Nichols’ 1998 movie "Primary Colors," is on the film team.

Madonna, who adopted two children from Africa, loved the book, Walker said. "I think it’s going to be a really interesting creative process."