Set in the modern-day upper-crust Jewish community of North West London, a community still under the shadow of the Holocaust and where the bonds of family and tradition run deep, The Innocents is inspired by the stifling fin-de-siècle New York society immortalized in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence. The Innocents illuminates the conflict between responsibility and passion, security and exhilaration, tradition and independence.

Newly engaged and smugly self-satisfied, Adam Newman is forced to re-examine his life's path when his fiancée's prodigal cousin Ellie Schneider returns to London with rumors of a scandal swirling around her. Adam has been with local beauty Rachel for thirteen years, and her family adores him; he is even set to inherit her father's business. In Rachel at age twenty-eight--sweet, innocent, conventional--he can see the home she would make for him at fifty. But Ellie, troubled, vulnerable, and fiercely independent, offers a liberation he had not known existed. Adam begins to see that he could choose for himself, but his choices will threaten the fabric of both family and community.

David Misch