May, 1940. Brighton.

On Park Crescent, a sunlit and usually tranquil street, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news. The enemy is expected to land on the beaches of Brighton any day.

It is a year of tension, change, and anticipation. Geoffrey becomes Superintendent of the enemy alien camp at the far reaches of town, while young Philip is gripped by rumours that Hitler will make Brighton's Royal Pavilion his English HQ and spends hours with his friends imagining life in Brighton under Hitler's rule. And as the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn quietly struggles to fall in with the war effort and her thoughts become tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation.

Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a 'degenerate' German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband's internment camp. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn's and Otto's mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest. Love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, and the lives of Evelyn, Otto and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably.