The book is both a history of a violent century seen through eyes of two survivors as well as an intimate portrait of their friendship, marriage and abiding yet complex love Shanti Behari Seth was born in 1908 He was brought up in India in the late years of the Raj, and was sent by his family in the 1930s to Berlin to study medicine and dentistry It was here, before he migrated to Britain, that Shanti's path first crossed that of his future wife Henny Gerda Caro was also born in 1908, in Berlin to a Jewish family, cultured, patriotic and intensely German When the family decided to have Shanti as a loger, Henny's first reaction was 'Don't take a black man!' But a friendship flowered and when Henny fled Hitler's Germany for England one month before war broke out, she was met by the only person she knew in the country Shanti