When she graduates from the Juilliard School in 1988, free-spirited Katherine Angelis baulks at family expectations pointing to the rigorous life of the concert circuit. A grant to study the manuscript of a composition by Dvořák in Prague gives her a year off - in a city which her family fled after the Communist coup d'état four decades earlier.

Far from home, in a culture whose literature, art and music she has cherished since childhood, Katherine revels in speaking her 'second language' and the beauty of Prague. But her dream of a year of quiet reflection is complicated by a love triangle with an activist and a reclusive cellist. She readily accepts the opportunity offered by her new Czech friends to join the dangerous covert resistance against a hard-line regime in place since the 'brotherly assistance' of the Warsaw Pact invasion.

As she discovers new purpose translating and smuggling human rights reports out to the West and blacklisted books in, Katherine feels that opposing the kind of tyranny that has hurt her family and millions of others is a special kind of music...

In a lyrical and nuanced narrative, Janet Savin dramatises accelerating protest against a brutal and desperate regime in one of Europe's most beautiful old cities. This first of two volumes draws from her life in Prague during the buildup to the Velvet Revolution and offers a poignant, and richly detailed story of an expatriate family's longing for their home land and a young woman's search for her place in its heritage.