Marian Sutro has one quality that marks her out --- she is a native French speaker. It is this that attracts the attention of the Special Operations Executive, which trains agents to operate in occupied Europe. Drawn into this strange, secret world at the age of 19, she finds herself parachuting into France from an RAF bomber to join the WORDSMITH resistance network.

Against a shifting backdrop of Alpine peaks, a small Welsh village, and the bombed-out London of World War II, a man and two women come together. Years later, the tangle of their relationships is imprinted on the lives of two fatherless young men, friends since childhood, who find themselves similarly ensnared in a series of love triangles.