When Hitler comes to power in 1933, a tight-knit group of friends and lovers become hunted outlaws overnight. United in their resistance to the madness and tyranny of Nazism, they flee the country. Dora, passionate and fearless; her lover, the great playwright Ernst Toller; her younger cousin Ruth and Ruth's husband Hans find refuge in London. Here they take awe-inspiring risks in order to continue their work in secret. But England is not the safe-haven they think it is, and a single, chilling act of betrayal will tear them apart. Some seventy years later, Ruth is living out her days is Sydney, making an uneasy peace with the ghosts of her past, and a part of history that has all but been forgotten.

Winner of the 2011 WA Premier's Literary Award, the 2012 Miles Franklin Award, winner of the ABIA Book of the Year, 2012; shortlisted for the 2012 Prime Minister's Literary Awards for Fiction.