Hugo Wylde is awaiting his wife Bridey outside their Jacobean Manor house in 1640, when a thunderstorm suddenly breaks overhead and he is struck by lightning. When he first awakes, he thinks that he must be in heaven. Men and women clothed in white, with brilliant light haloing them, surround him, but once he realizes that his persona has been irrevocably switched with that of another man, one Duncan Miller, a university lecturer, Hugo soon decides he has not only had a shift in time, but in actual fact he has been delivered into hell... Hugo finds that he has been transported forwards in time some four hundred years, into an unrecognisable world full of noise, strange technology, a world that is now full of people. Join him as he tries to understand our modern day values and customs. How will he survive and live in a world he is so completely unequipped to deal with? Will the help of a modern woman who had been in love with Duncan Miller make it possible for Hugo to find his way? Will he make the right choice when he realizes that the modern world is simply not for him? The answer to his future may be found in a note left for him four centuries earlier by the man who took over his peaceful existence. Hugo decides to travel thousands of miles away from the England, the land of his birth, to America, to join other like- minded folk who eschew the trappings of a modern world; the Amish people. When he comes to the rescue of a young widow, will these people open not only their community, but will one open her heart?