Ellen Carr is raised to be an intellectual - but what she really wants to do is cook beautiful food. So Ellen is thrilled to leave behind the grey drizzle of London and start her first job - as a housekeeper at the Hallendorf School of Music, Drama and Dance. Deep in the idyllic Austrian countryside she finds an eccentrically magical world occupied by wild children, experimental dancers, a tortoise on wheels and a mysterious young gardener called Marek.

But outside this paradise, Hitler's Reich is casting its menacing shadow over Europe...