Dava and Barr Pennington, professors at a Midwestern university, both harbor potent secrets. Dava is unhappy in their marriage and secretly in love with a colleague, Svetlana White. Spurred by their complicated liaison, she spends her nights working on a novel about two women. The writing becomes increasingly difficult as her memory begins to fail; tests reveal that she’s suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s. Soon afterward, her husband discovers her hidden manuscript. Over the next two years he rewrites the novel and publishes it as his own, to wide acclaim. But persistent feelings of guilt lead him to confess his theft to an unlikely party.

Marseille, 1940. Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated journalist and editor, arrives in France. Recognizing the darkness descending over Europe, he and a group of like-minded New Yorkers formed the Emergency Rescue Committee, helping artists and writers escape from the Nazis and immigrate to the United States. Now, amid the chaos of World War II, and in defiance of restrictive U.S. immigration policies, Fry must procure false passports, secure visas, seek out escape routes through the Pyrenees and by sea, and make impossible decisions about who should be saved, all while under profound pressure --- and in a state of irrevocable personal change.