Julianna Kiss, twenty-one, inexperienced and gentle, arrives in England from rural Hungary in May 1990. She's a student and has come to earn money and see the country where her grandmother was born, by picking fruit on a farm in southern England. It's a lush, pastoral passage, where she falls in love with Matthew, son of the reluctant farmer, Gerard Woods, and his unfulfilled wife, Miriam. In September, after the death of her much-loved grandmother, Julianna and Matthew arrange to meet in London, where he is going to university, to spend a final month together before she returns to Hungary to college. His mother intervenes and he never arrives to pick her up, and her bag and her summer's savings are stolen. Julianna ends up staying and working in a restaurant by night, dry cleaners by day. Dead broke and surviving on the margins of London, Julianna discovers her own will and strength for the first time...