GCSE's are over and sixteen-year-old Imogen is looking forward to a perfect, lazy English summer. But her world is turned upside down by three refugees, all hiding from life. Anthony is fourteen, already an outcast, bullied and shunned by his peers. Farid is an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who has travelled across continents seeking peace. And Gordon Craig is a bitter, lonely man. She knows all of them, but she doesn't know how dangerous they are.
The third novel in Annie Murray's "Birmingham" series. While Genie's father is away fighting in World War II, her mother has a ruinous affair which leaves her pregnant; Genie's little brother leaves, never to return; while Genie herself meets a man who then disappears to war.