London, 1920: a young American heiress, Jean Buckman, arrives into a society decimated by war but clinging on to the status quo.  Jean’s father is the new Ambassador, her mother a New York society titan of hungry ambition. Keen to escape the shadow of her parents, Jean marries Edward Warre, inheritor of a once great, now struggling Northern estate: he is at turns alluring and distant, a product of the system, riven with insecurity.

As Jean’s marriage falters, she spends a summer in the South of France, an undreamt-of world of freedom and liberation. She embarks on an affair with an American writer, the repercussions of which will dominate the rest of her life; the sweet taste of another world that society and its strictures will do their best to keep her from.

What follows is a devastating story of duty, scandal, loss – taking us from the wilds of Northumberland and the sparkling Cote d’Azur, to New York of the 1930s and Blitz-ravaged London – and at its heart, one mother’s attempt to protect her sons from a truth that threatens to destroy them.