This novel picks up right where the first book left off, as its five interrelated families, American, German, Russian, English, Welsh, enter a time of enormous social, political, and economic turmoil, beginning with the rise of the Third Reich, through the Spanish Civil War and the great dramas of World War II, up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs. Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, finds her life engulfed...

Follows the fates of five interrelated families--American, German, Russian, English and Welsh--as they move through the world-shaking dramas of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage.