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.

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.