In 1999, history
author Stuart Gratton is intrigued by a minor mystery of the European
war which ended on 10 May 1941. The British-German armistice signed that
month has had far-reaching consequences, including a resettlement of
European Jews in Madagascar.

In 1936, the identical twin
brothers Joe and Jack Sawyer win a rowing medal for Britain in the
Berlin Olympics: it's presented to them by Rudolf Hess. The brothers are
separated not only by a twin's fierce need "to be treated as a separate
human being", but by sexual rivalry and even ideology. When war breaks
out Jack becomes a gung-ho bomber pilot, Joe a conscientious objector.
Still they're inescapably linked, and sometimes confused. Both suffer
injuries and hauntingly similar ambulance journeys. Churchill writes a
puzzled memo (later unearthed by Gratton) about the anomaly of a
registered-pacifist Red Cross worker flying planes for Bomber Command.
Hess has significant, eventually incompatible meetings with both men.
Contradictions are everywhere.