Book excerpt: Six students, friends from childhood, grow up in Prague before the Second World War. Their lives are set against the cataclysmic events in Czechoslovakia, from its dismemberment by the Nazis in 1938, through the war, the Communist coup d'etat in 1948, and all the way to the restoration of democracy in 1989. Two of them leave for England and enlist in the Royal Air Force. Another is deported to Terezin, a place designated by the Nazis as 'a model town for Jews' where, under awful circumstances, she gives birth to a child. Those who survive the war wrestle with careers, love affairs and marriages as they struggle to retrieve lost relationships."