Alix has endured two years as a guerrilla fighter with Tito’s Partisans. She has become a trusted confidant of the leader but she has also been wounded and has suffered a great personal loss. She has also found joy and hope for the future after being reunited with Steve, the American boy she fell in love with when she was a student in Paris.

For much of the book she also works with British officers of the Special Operations Executive who have been parachuted in to discover the identity and objectives of the mysterious leader called Tito. The whole book has been intensively researched and many of the details are taken from accounts left by these men, particularly by F.W.D (William) Deakin, whose book The Embattled Mountain was an invaluable source.

While Alix is in the mountains her mother, Leo, has been seconded to the SOE office in Cairo where she encounters the same officers before they are dispatched and through them learns for the first time of Alix’s involvement. For Sasha, with his royalist connections, the idea that his daughter is working with Tito is hard to take. The question they all have to face in their own way is what sort of country will they find, if and when they get home.