A story of first love and the struggle for personal identity, as two young people meet by chance in the summer of 1968. Yet the depth of their feelings is immediately challenged by the tragedy and intolerance of international politics. Roy has a good heart but is very naïve, with little experience of the real world or of girls, when he meets Eva during a short seaside holiday before going to university. She is Czech, in the UK on sabbatical from her own studies, but the Prague Spring is being crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion and she needs to return home. Based on true events, with characters and places fictionalised, the narrative moves between Britain and Czechoslovakia, describing the invasion in parallel with the lovers’ desperate efforts to find themselves and save their relationship in the face of rejection by their governments and families alike. As a newly democratic nation is overpowered by ideology, an ordinary young couple fight to be allowed to love in the heady days of the Sixties. There is not one character who will not be profoundly changed by the year’s events, with so many things hidden, unsaid or ambiguous.
