You see, whichever way I look at it, it is unmistakably a love story. It was always going to be a love story . . .
A woman looks back at the last summer she spent in Berlin - a successful writer in her youth, she left her beloved adopted city never wrote again.
Fifty years earlier, a group of friends enjoy late summer in the city: Sam had left Haifa, Eimear had buried her parents in Derry, Alasne left her Basque Country home. All had made a life in the city that had for decades offered a home to artists and writers who had left - by will or by force - their homelands. It's a place to enjoy freedom, but also to fall in love - with the city, with the beautiful stranger across from you at a reading.
But as summer turns to autumn, the world gets increasingly dark and crackdowns against artists and protestors increase, the group of friends are brutally reminded that tyranny comes in different forms, that a once-loved city can become very hostile indeed, and a place that was home can make you a stranger again.