When a young French schoolmaster accepts an offer to spend a year teaching English in a lycée in a remote corner of Eastern France it's not just to improve his spoken French and gain a deeper insight into the workings of a foreign culture. He longs to wipe his slate clean of past failures and to escape the entrenchment into which his English life is sinking. He dreams of freedom, adventure, romance, a more authentic kind of living, and the narrowing of that gap between what he is and what he'd like to be. But his year reserves some dramatic surprises. And over his head dangles the gut-piercing threat that at any moment this fascinating new life could be brought to a premature end.