Following the death of his wife, Ryan Petersen, a professor of European Literature at a New England University, is offered a year's exchange lectureship with London University. Accompanied by his matriarchal mother Hannah, who is hell-bent on finding him a new and more suitable wife, and his difficult young son, Joel, he arrives in swinging sixties London. But in exchanging his native land for England the reserved, cynical, woman-wary Ryan has one even more compelling reason for crossing the pond - to find the woman with whom he had a passionate wartime love affair over twenty years before...