When his parents bring home Ha, a Vietnam War orphan, twelve-year-old Simon's world is turned upside down, and he becomes more and more uncertain of his own identity.
Although life in London during World War II has been difficult for Dot and her mother, the young girl is frightened by the changes that the end of the war brings, particularly the impending return of the father she has never known.
Albert is an epileptic who lives a cloistered life with his mother in nineteenth-century England, and while she deludes herself searching for a miracle cure, Albert eventually begins to accept his condition and to become self-reliant.
