Tom Cameron's death after an ailing illness decides his daughter and heir, college librarian Isobel, to leave job and home in search of peaceful Cornish country pleasure. Stumbling upon the house where the Camerons once enjoyed a family holiday, she settles their and concentrates on its marvelous garden and hothouse. She also strikes up friendship with some neighbors, in the case of the castle-inhabiting doctor-financier with an option for love, while scorning the champion shepherd she hires as gardening helper. She also invites the true youth lover she lost trough indecisiveness, but he turns up with a fiancée and a wedding invitation
For fans of history, this glimpse of Munich society in the 1920s will be a much-treasured event. The story revolves around an art-gallery manager who puts on a show featuring the scandalous works of a woman artist who committed suicide. He is unjustly accused of having committed adultery with her, and for some reason the authorities decide to make an example of him. He is imprisoned at about the same time that Hitler and the nascent Nazi party attempt the infamous Beer Hall Putsch, and the gallery manager's girlfriend and a Swiss writer valiantly (and unsuccessfully) attempt to get better justice for him. Nobody in authority, it seems, has the courage to take up the challenge of righting this particular injustice.
Paul Winkelmann is the CEO of a successful business in Hamburg that he took over after the death of his father eight years ago. But he is still strongly dominated by his 78 year old mother who cares for him as a child, and who cannot understand why he took an apartment on his own after all these years. The real "problem" starts when Paul gets to know psychologist Margarethe Tietze whose relationship to her parents is also not so easy after all.