The book is an account of what happened to some of the best German writers and journalists after they fled the Nazi terror to find shelter in France. It is a tragic intellectual drama that unfolds over seven years, and features writers such as Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, as well as H. G. Wells, Andre Malraux, Aldous Huxley and Andre Gide. It recounts how persecuted writers settled in a colony in the south of France how they tried to counter-attack, aided by British and French writers, how they quarrelled among themselves and how they sought to alert the West to Nazi plans for military conquest and warn the German people that Hitler was plunging the nation into ruin.