This novel plunges readers into the suspenseful world of 1960s Czechoslovakia, revealing the divide between war games played by idealistic young Britons and deadly real-life politics. In the summer of 1968--a year of love and hate, of Prague Spring and Cold War winter-- Oxford students James Borthwick and Eleanor Pike set out to hitchhike across Europe, complicating a budding friendship that could be something more. Having reached Southern Germany, they decide on a whim to visit Czechoslovakia, where Alexander Dubc̆ek's "socialism with a human face" is smiling on the world. Meanwhile, Sam Wareham, First Secretary at the British embassy in Prague, is observing developments in the country with both a diplomat's cynicism and a young man's passion. In the company of Czech student Lenka Koneckova, he finds a way into the world of Czechoslovak youth, its hopes and its ideas. For the first time, nothing seems off limits behind the Iron Curtain. Yet the wheels of politics are grinding in the background. The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev is making demands of Dubc̆ek, and the Red Army is massed on the borders. How will the looming disaster affect those fragile lives caught up in the invasion?