American Ruby Henderson follows her new husband, Marcel, to Paris in 1938, on the eve of war. She is stunned to learn that Marcel has been hiding Allied soldiers in a secret room near their flat, but when France falls to the Nazis, she decides to stay and assist the burgeoning resistance movement. She takes in a Jewish girl whose parents were recently deported, and falls under the spell of an RAF pilot seeking shelter after being shot down. This is an intense and deeply emotional novel.