Kept busy by her obligations as a wife and mother, art history professor Ava Zaretsky has little time to devote to her research and writing. Now tagging along on her film-producer husband’s shoot in Bulgaria for the summer, where she’s mostly solo parenting her sweet son and rebellious budding tween daughter, she has a chance encounter with her fierce feminist mentor from college, which changes everything. Ava is swept up into a circle of women who reenact ancient Greco-Roman mystery rites of initiation, bringing her research to life and illuminating the story of a 5th-century-BC mother-daughter pair whose sense of female loyalty to each other and connection to the divine feminine guides Ava in her exploration of the eternal stages of womanhood.

Vera's wealth cannot protect her or her four-year-old-daughter, Lucie, once the Nazis occupy France. Ordered to report to an internment camp, Russian Jewish Vera must make an impossible choice: bring Lucie with her, or put her into hiding. Believing the war will end soon, Vera chooses to leave Lucie in safety. She cannot know that she and her husband will have an opportunity to escape, to flee to America. She cannot know that Lucie will be too far to reach in time. And so begins a heartbreaking separation and journey, a war and a continent apart. Vera's marriage will falter under the surreal sun of California. But her determination to return to France and find Lucie will only grow. Then she meets Sasha, a man on his own search for meaning. Together, they will travel to France in search of Lucie.