A prize-winning historical romance with powerful currents of sexuality, a rambling old house, a young girl, and the brooding man teaching her to fence.

Germany, 1936. Nazism is taking hold. Janna, a young Dutch girl, has been sent to the embittered aristocrat Egon von Bötticher to train as a fencer. Bötticher is as eccentric as his training methods, yet the pupil soon finds herself falling for her master — a man tormented by a wartime past in which Janna's father is implicated.