In the summer of 1968, Oxford students James Borthwick and Eleanor Pike are hitchhiking across Europe, and decide on a whim to visit Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, Sam Wareham, First Secretary at the British embassy in Prague, meets Czech student Lenka Kone?ková, and gains his first understanding of the nation's youth, its hopes and its ideas. But in this novel by the Man Booker Prize finalist The Glass Room, the Red Army is massed on the borders, and all of these fragile lives will be caught up in the invasion.