Celebrated children’s writer Hans Christian Andersen arrives, unannounced, for a stay at Gad’s Hill Place in the Kent marshes - home to Charles Dickens and his large, charismatic family.

To the lonely and eccentric guest, the members of Dicken’s household seem to live a life of unreachable bliss. But with his broken English, Andersen doesn’t at first see the storms brewing within the family: undeclared passions, a son about to go to India, and a growing strangeness at the heart of Dickens’s marriage.