For Kerza Freiborne, the war began with fire and ended in ice. But Ally bombs and a march through frozen fields did not come first: the war had a precursor that brought it to her doorstep in the shape of hunched shoulders, dirt-smudged cheeks and a gold star sewn to the breast of a sweater. A fugitive Jew in the heart of Nazi Germany is not a thing that can be simply swept beneath a rug, and thusly, it is the attic of Kerza's family in which the traumatized, stammering boy must take shelter. With the battlefield drawing closer and a country's old prejudice reaching a boiling point, the line between us and them is blurred and the duplicity of human nature becomes clearer every day. But for better or worse, this Jew and German are the most important people in each others lives, and everything they thought they understood of their world will soon change forever.

1558. Elizabeth, the last of King Henry's heirs, is a traitor's daughter. Now, she is England's last hope. After five gruesome years, Bloody Mary is on her deathbed. She lives her sister Elizabeth a daunting inheritance: the throne of England. The bishops will not anoint a heretic. A foreign queen plots for the throne. And Englishmen and foreigners alike are starting to notice Elizabeth's growing infatuation for a man who spent his youth in a traitor's cell. And the people demand a prince to fill the empty throne by Elizabeth's side: a husband that may wrest away every morsel of her power. Tides are turning in England, and no one is safe. Not even the queen.

The year is 1965: a year thrumming with promise and hope and change all around the globe. But for two people, change seems out of the question. Their worlds are rigid, stuck, fixed—and completely contradictory to one another. Holly is a frazzled and reclusive mess from the wrong side of the tracks—well, the wrong side of everything, really—struggling to keep herself afloat as she copes with the loss of her nursing school scholarship two years before. Simon, on the other hand, is charming, arrogant, smart-mouthed and spoiled rotten—the only thing he has ever wanted for is a pair of proper lungs, as his own have been slowly ruined by the effects of Cystic Fibrosis. When Holly joins a peculiar non-profit agency in hope for nursing experience, their worlds are suddenly conjoined a little too close for comfort. Through bickering, old maps, collect calls and a great many letters, Holly and Simon are intertwined in a journey to find a future they never knew existed, suspended in the transience of yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Through a series of flashbacks, World War II veteran Jamie describes the epic story of four teenagers. Secret conversations, hidden meetings, devious identities. This is their story of survival. This is history. This is the Red Autumn of Paris. ((All of the characters and instances in this story are strictly fictional, with historical backgrounds of the time and occurrences to support the story. Any relations of any kind are not purposeful.))

Sara is the temperamental, quick-to-judge daughter of an upstanding Protestant family in the countryside of Cologne. To her, the war has always seemed a far-away nuisance. That is, until a warm night in the summer of 1944, when a jarring dose of reality is dumped upon their doorstep: young, fraught, and Jewish. Enter Benjamin Jastrow, the child of an old family friend and the new and indefinite resident of the Fleischers' attic. He is violently shy, coping with various stages of post-traumatic stress, and can hardly form a sentence without stammering—a nearly perfect opposite of the blustering Sara, who positively abhors his presence in her home. But for better or worse, they are the most important people in each others lives, and everything they thought they understood of their world will soon change forever.