Seventy-year-old Will Johnstone dozes off one afternoon, half a glass of red wine beside him. He wakes in 1962 crouched beside a railway line, in his twelve-year-old body. What's more, his twelve-year-old self is about to escape his abusive father … by committing suicide. Will recoils from this and resumes his troubled life as a seventy-year-old trapped in a teenage body. But this world is different from the one knows and he has no choice but to accept the uncertainties this brings. He sets out to rescue himself, doing his best to mask his strange nature, but family and school sense something different in him.

Will finds unexpected friendship in Col and Lili. Through these friendships, Will is swept into events at the edge of a dangerously different Cold War as MI6 meddles in their lives and Will is tricked into a trip behind the Iron Curtain. In East Germany, confronted by the secret police, Will must find a way to keep his friends' secrets or they will die.