While searching the Montmartre Cemetery for his lost father’s grave, Henri Hoffman, a Parisian boy of eleven, meets an orphaned German teenager named Monika. Alone, Henri allows the homeless girl to reside with him, and the two struggle together in occupied Paris from 1942-1945. Eight years after liberation, along with their toddler, Jacqueline, the couple joins Henri’s cousin, Manny Hoffman, an ex-GI, in New York City, where they’re welcomed in by his close-knit, gentle family—Manny’s wife, spinster sisters, and aspiring-actress niece. As the years wear on, the family fractures as familial relationships are sabotaged by the traumatic brutality of a haunted past—a past that, by the 1960s, is feeding on the destruction of new generations.

Will the wounds of war continue to drive the Hoffman family into the darkness of repression, manipulation, and abuse—or will they wake from their post-war fugue and rise above their individual tragedies before more children die?