Recounts the childhoods of two men who were adolescents during the Second World War and became friends as adults in California: Frederic Tubach, a German, and Bernat Rosner, a Hungarian Jew whose family was murdered at Auschwitz.
Chronicles the life of twentieth-century English poet Ted Hughes, covering, among other topics, his writings and his troubled relationships with Sylvia Plath and Assia Wevill.