Perhaps it all started when a kind stranger helped Rachel to board the
Kindertransport in 1939, or in 2025 when scientists Jamie and Annamarie
accidentally invented a time portal.
Or maybe when Jamie's mother Fran, the only historian they could trust
to keep their secret, persuaded them to let her investigate an ancestral
mystery in person. But now Annamarie is missing in Nazi occupied Prague,
and Jamie must arrive on time to undertake a desperate rescue mission.
Meanwhile, four-year-old Freddie, grandson to Fran and nephew to Jamie,
struggles with vague memories of a time before he was born, and a deep
sense that his grandmother is in danger. When Annamarie fails to return
from her trip through the portal, all play crucial roles in an initial
attempt to recover her. As events unfold, it falls to Jamie to undertake
a dangerous mission to Nazi-occupied Prague to arrive on time to ensure
that Rachel boards the train to her destiny in England, to maintain the
integrity of the timeline.
As each character in succession becomes embroiled in their own ancestral
issues, they are buffeted by events relating to the Scottish diaspora,
Scottish Presbyterianism in the late nineteenth century, the Battle of
the Somme, the Kindertransport of 1939, the Czech resistance movement of
World War II, the Californian hippie culture of the 1960s, the Prague
Spring of 1968 and their families' geographical transience in time. As
their adventures unfold, they begin to understand their immersion in
history, through deep and enduring emotional connections between
generations, transcending time and location.
